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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24676342">Object Lessons: Season 7</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn'>Polly_Lynn</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Object Lessons [7]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Castle (TV 2009)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Amnesia, Angst, F/M, Family, Fluff, Friendship, Holidays, Humor, Married Couple, Partners to Lovers, Psychological Trauma, Romance, Team as Family, Trauma, Weddings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 06:34:09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>23,886</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24676342</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>I recently started rewatching Castle from the beginning, after taking time off after Dialogic. With Dialogic, I chose a line of dialogue from each episode to prompt the story. For these stories, I chose an object from the episode.</p><p>Although I suppose in my mind these are "in continuity" with one another, one can certainly read them independent of one another.<br/>Series</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Javier Esposito/Lanie Parish, Jenny O'Malley/Kevin Ryan, Kate Beckett &amp; Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Object Lessons [7]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1622947</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Horologue—Driven (7 x 01)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>He understands that he does not get to be hurt in this scenario. He comes to understand that as he stares out the hospital window on to Manhattan streets that shimmer in the heat of July. He comes to understand it as his fingers keep absently brushing over the newly acquired scar on his ribs, as he clicks idly through TV channels, every one peppered with ads for back-to-school sales, with ads announcing slashed prices on grills and patio furniture, with box office numbers for the summer blockbusters he hasn’t seen.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p></p><div class="">
  <p>He understands that he does not get to be hurt in this scenario. He comes to understand that as he stares out the hospital window on to Manhattan streets that shimmer in the heat of July. He comes to understand it as his fingers keep absently brushing over the newly acquired scar on his ribs, as he clicks idly through TV channels, every one peppered with ads for back-to-school sales, with ads announcing slashed prices on grills and patio furniture, with box office numbers for the summer blockbusters he hasn’t seen.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He understands—when he’s alert enough to see the toll that two entire fucking months have taken on his mother, on Alexis, on Kate who has bravely searched for him all this time—that he doesn’t get to be hurt. He doesn’t get to feel fragile, unsteady on his feet, uncertain of how to do any of this. Those are the feelings they get to have, and he understands that. He does. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But he’s going to need a new emotional palette—an entirely new affective vocabulary—because he is not okay. He is staring out windows and flipping through TV channels, for one thing.  While other people talk about him, work up his blood and his brain, go through the clothes he was found in with combs and tweezers, he is trying not to feel like an alien in his own  summer robe, his own t-shirt, and a pair of high-end silk pajama pants that feel wildly tone deaf under the circumstances, but those are the consequences of sending Martha Rodgers on an improvised errand when it turns out that Martha Rodgers is too much for whatever moment this is.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But hurt is the only word that will seem to do when she bangs the door open for the second time. It’s the only word when she talks about evidence, when he has to argue that his supposed campsite doesn’t make sense on a character level. Hurt—however unreasonable, unfair, ungenerous, <em>unthinkable </em>it is—is the only word for what he feels. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He swings like pendulum again when they’re back at the precinct. He sees the board. He sees his own grainy self looking furtive and tossing a satchel full of cash into the dumpster. He sees the photo of Vinny Cardano, his beach house neighbor. He sees how fucking implausible his innocence seems, and he doesn’t know how he will ever win back her trust, when he doesn’t know what was done to him—what he did. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He doesn’t know how to live with the scraped raw feeling that even with all this she should have kept believing in him. In two long months, she’s had a lapse of faith in the face of overwhelming evidence that lasted less than a day, all told, and he doesn’t know what to do with this completely unkind sense that he is somehow the wounded party. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>So he simply goes on. It seems to be the only thing. He goes on—he goes home and she goes unhesitatingly, non-negotiably with him, and he supposes it . . . needn’t have gone that way. She’s the one who lets them into the loft. She has her key and he doesn’t and he realizes she needn’t have come home with him, and terrified is the word for that. Terrified. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But she bears him up through the celebration with his mother, with Alexis, because she sees that he needs that. She smiles in a startled, grateful way when he toasts to the love of his life. She toasts to coming home in a small quiet voice, and she’s the one to insist that they go to bed. She insists she’s exhausted, that he must be, and she peels him away from Alexis and Martha with a playful smile that costs her energy she doesn’t have. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s a quiet affair, getting ready for bed. He can’t bear the clothes he’s in. He can’t bear the sight of the light summer robe, the t-shirt, the ridiculously high-end silk pajama pants, so he stuffs it all deep down in the hamper that’s half full of two-month-old clothes. He studies the room while she’s in the bathroom and tries not to wonder if she’s taking longer than usual. He clamps down on the thought that she’s stalling and shakes loose of its hold. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>And he sees the watch on the night table. She appears just as he has the courage to pick it up. It shouldn’t be here. It should be in evidence or maybe not. He’s lost track of whether he is a crime or not—whether his body, his personal effects, his miserably blank mind are a walking crime scene. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But whether he is or isn’t, whether they are or aren’t, his watch shouldn’t be here. But it is, because she put it there. Because she got it from wherever it was—wherever it possibly should still be—and she set it on his night table for him to find, because she didn’t lose faith. Not really. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She came home with him and she has her key. She came home with him and she brought his watch. She came home with him despite the unanswered questions and the mountain of evidence. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He is not okay, any more than she is. But hurt is not the word for what he is.</p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: The watch, I guess . . . always strange what gets liberated from evidence and what doesn’t. Hmm</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Divaricate—Montreal (7 x 02)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>He wants to hunt up Sunshine Sara. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="">
  <p>He wants to hunt up Sunshine Sara. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“The one Alexis had.” He’s bustling behind the kitchen counter. It’s a Wednesday morning and he’s made a Sunday brunch amount of food. He’s made a Sunday-brunch-for-absolutely-everyone-either-of-them knows amount of food. “She’s got to be around. In the basement storage maybe. Or the rental storage. It’s not like I ever threw anything out.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Rental storage?” she asks, blearily slugging down coffee. She was barely awake in the first place, and now she’s rapidly slipping into a food coma. “There’s rental storage?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Aren’t you the woman who once told me that everyone needs their stuff?” He makes an accusatory gesture with the spatula. “To remind them of their past, I believe you said?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“So you have rental space to remind you of Alexis’s past?” It’s meant to be a riposte. The situation seems to call for one, but it falls flat. It makes him draw into himself. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Yeah . . . it’s stupid.” He cranks off the flame beneath the eggs, the second batch of bacon. “Sorry,” he says, and it’s awkward. Neither of them knows for what. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Monkey-Bunkey comes up later. She’s trying to work her way through something utterly tedious, but utterly necessary to the only lead they have on their open case, and he’s talking a mile a minute, again. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I <em>did </em>threaten to throw out Monkey-Bunkey. Good thing I didn’t, though. Totally cracked the kidnapping case.” He leans an elbow on the edge of her desk. It sets her stack of folders to sliding. It threatens to topple them, but he’s not paying attention. “I would never have thought of the pink bunny if it hadn’t been for Monkey-Bunkey. Good thing <em>he’s </em>not off in storage.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Castle . . .” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She’s not even snapping at him. Snapping would be okay. It’s in their repertoire. But she’s sighing. She’s unexpectedly on the verge of exhausted tears, and he’s almost too amped up to notice. Almost. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Sor—” He presses his lips together. He’s remembering the kitchen and the awkwardness and the apology stalls out. That’s awkward, too. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s awkward that they’re emotional ships passing in the night. It’s one month minus one day until they’ll talk about it again. Getting married. She lobbed it out there, tentatively. He took it as a promise—a date—and  this is where they are right now. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He needs the past. He needs to stitch himself back into his own life, and that means hunting  down Sunshine Sara and arranging a State Visit from Monkey-Bunkey to the world outside Alexis’s bedroom. That means reminding her with a wink and a superior nod that early on, he caught her sleeping in a little girl’s rocking chair while he crawled around looking for the absence of something—looking for the hole where the beloved object ought to be. He needs heroic tales of recovery, reunion—of the restoration of happily ever after.  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She, in absolute contrast, needs the present. She has, for two months going on three, been falling forward, moment by moment. She is <em>still </em>falling forward—trusting one set of instincts, one way of knowing, and not the other. And she’s grateful for what <em>his </em>needs have yielded. She is <em>so grateful </em>for the envelope—for her name in his handwriting and for the only message he could send. She is grateful for the affirmation of his devotion in that taut, terrifying moment. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She understands that when he thinks of Sunshine Sara,  he sees a toddling little Alexis with her red-headed rag doll twin bumping down the stairs of the loft like Edward Bear. She understands that he’s thinking of the moment that she—with Angela Candela in her arms—reached down and reunited the pink bunny with his beloved little girl. She knows he’s thinking about photos in frames and the triumph of instinct and sentimental connection over logic, detachment, objectivity.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She can see that it’s all about stitching himself back into his own life, but it’s something more, too. It’s sleight of hand. It’s<em> nothing up my sleeve, please don’t ask me what Fake Henry Jenkins knows that the people I love most in the world don’t. </em></p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s guilt that such a thing exists that has him wanting to hunt down Sunshine Sara, wanting to get married right away. It’s guilt that has him amped up, when she is merely falling forward. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She’d like to help him, she really would. She’d like to reminisce, right then and there, or leave the chaos of her desk exactly as it is so they can hunt down Sunshine Sara. She’d like to be on <em>his </em>ship—always—but what she sees in her mind is poor Annie in a picture frame with Sunshine Sara in her mouth, worrying the thing to death.  </p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: Oof. Miserable. That picture of the pup with the doll in her mouth kills me. Hmm. </p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Tintinnabulation—Clear and Present Danger (7 x 03)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>There is a vast telephonic conspiracy against him. It begins, of course, just when they have said plainly to one another what has desperately needed saying—that he is ready and she is ready and they are both very invested in one upping each other in the I-am-so-ready department, and he is definitely here for that kind of competition. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p></p><div class="">
  <p>There is a vast telephonic conspiracy against him. It begins, of course, just when they have said plainly to one another what has desperately needed saying—that he is ready and she is ready and they are both very invested in one upping each other in the I-am-so-ready department, and he is definitely here for that kind of competition. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>And her cell rings, and what the actual fuck-interrupted is that about? He gives the phone an evil look. She gives the phone evil look. He wonders if maybe the cursed thing it’s jealous because  phone sex wasn’t in tonight’s game plan. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The first strike is unspeakably frustrating, but he doesn’t know it’s a conspiracy right away. He doesn’t believe, even when her benighted cell rings <em>again </em>just when Fats Shepherd is getting to the really good part about William Fairwick selling his soul to the devil. It’s Esposito and he “has something.” He forgives the phone. He is blind to the conspiracy, even after this second attack, because what Esposito “has” is security footage, and that footage is even more of a goldmine for driving Beckett insane than Shepherd’s story, and he is very much in the market for anything that will aid and abet him in driving Beckett insane, because they are <em>ready. </em></p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s when her desk phone gets in on the action that he begins to see the shape of it—the vast, shadowy, insidious, telephonic conspiracy that deserves all the other purple prose his mind can muster. Because she is ready again. He has pulled out all the stops with the Satanic angle, and exactly according to plan, it drives her insane. She looks like she might devour him right there on the desk. And that is two votes for right there on the desk vetoed by the ringing phone. Vetoed by Lanie, and he wonders how far the conspiracy might extend. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The desk phone collapsing the foam on the lovingly-crafted latte he’s made her is just mean. It’s petty, and it worries him that no job is too big or too small when it comes to ruining his life by keeping him in a constant, cruelly unsatisfied state of readiness. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He hasn’t connected the dots quite yet to figure out how phones are involved in his mother’s ludicrous late-night yen for dental floss, but he knows the shadowy hand of conspiracy when he sees it. As he lies awake, feeling the heavy presence of his mother in her room up above, he wonders what he could have done to deserve this. He is a Friend to the Phone. He clings to his land line, and when it comes to his cell, he is an early adopter and a gadget aficionado. He has drunk the Kool-Aid and celebrated the presence of the phone in every facet of his life, yet here he is, beleaguered. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He’s almost afraid of Fairwick’s phone records. He’s wary of paper cuts that might turn gangrenous or some kind of staple- or highlighter-based injury that might debilitate one of them. And in his defense, it turns out he’s <em>not </em>paranoid. The phone records lead them to Donna, and Donna almost kills them both—twice—which is really telephonic conspiracy overkill. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Sandwiched in between, there’s the receptionist’s phone at Will’s nameless, beige, top secret former employer. That phone tries to kill them, too, and he wants the world to know that it is really going to need a new name for the rage kind of ghost he was going to come back as if he dies still ready. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But he does not die still ready. The phone records turn from foe to friend. They tell a story of manipulation and betrayal, of cold opportunism, and okay, the second time Donna tries to kill them is pretty cool—the phone records do him a solid by fixing it so the workday ends with flying beakers and the canny use of fire extinguishers. It ends with the two of them connecting in his second most favorite way. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He offers up a prayer of thanks to the telephonic spirits in charge for that, but that doesn’t stop him from taking precautions once they are finally—<em>finally</em>—alone. He surreptitiously unplugs the land line. He turns his own cell off, off <em>off</em> and hides it deep among the neatly rolled balls of his socks. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He picks her pocket when he’s helping her off with her jacket. He commanders the phone and considers his options. She is not on call. She is not on a case. She is off the clock in every meaningful way, and he is <em>not</em>taking any chances here. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He can’t quite get himself to turn it off entirely. It’s a bridge too far. But he silences it. He switches off all the bongles and buzzes, all of the beeps and dings. He hides its light among his underwear, then thinks better of it—that’s right next to the drawer with his socks. He hides it in the absolute bottom drawer of his bureau, among the pajama pants and sleep t-shirts. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He kicks back on the bed with his super-cool imaging goggles in a state of readiness. He waits, ad in a flash she appears—almost as ready as he is—and they come together. They devour one another, and there is blessed, uninterrupted silence. </p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: This is a particularly dumb one, which is a shame. I love this episode, but also, I am SO tired.  Ah well. TELEPHONIC CONSPIRACY. Hmm</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Make Believe—Child's Play (7 x 04)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>She’s dubious about the healing power of razor scooters. He calls her Doubting Thomas for it, and it seems to be apt. They come home long after she’s come home. She’s filed her report on the murder of the ice cream man and done the extra paperwork for youth interaction. She’s tidied up her desk and taken the long way home. She has stalled to give them some time just for the two of them, and even so, they’re still out when she makes it back to the loft. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="">
  <p>She’s dubious about the healing power of razor scooters. He calls her Doubting Thomas for it, and it seems to be apt. They come home long after <em>she’s </em>come home. She’s filed her report on the murder of the ice cream man and done the extra paperwork for youth interaction. She’s tidied up her desk and taken the long way home. She has stalled to give them some time just for the two of them, and even so, they’re still out when she makes it back to the loft. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But they roll in, literally, not long after. They’re breathless and laughing, and they have a slice of pizza for her. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Still hot.” He sidles up and wraps an arm around her. He’s sweaty and tousled. Alexis is pink-cheeked and grinning, and it looks like he was right to doubt her doubting. “Picked it up on out <em>second </em>swing by,” he adds like he was thinking the same thing. “Someone got hungry trying to keep up with this guy.”</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Sorry if the cheese slid everywhere.” Alexis rolls her eyes at the scooter her father has, of course, left sitting in the middle of the entryway. She folds his, along with her own, and finds a place for them in the coat closet. “Dad’s a reckless driver.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Shocking,” she replies as she snatches at a loop of cheese that has, indeed, managed to slide its way all over the triangular box.  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He crows about his success as they get ready for bed, of course. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Play, Detective Beckett.” He retrieves a Nerf gun from his bedside table and makes a <em>stick-‘em-up </em>gesture in her direction. “It’s good for what ails you.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I never said it wasn’t.” She shoots a warning glance at the toy. He shrugs and turns it on himself. He lands a gut shot and makes a great show of collapsing to the bed, letting the weapon slip dramatically from his hand. She smiles and rolls her eyes as she climbs under the covers on her own side. “I’m glad it helped.” She makes a point of sealing the sentiment with a kiss. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She <em>is </em>glad it helped. She’s happy for his sake <em>and </em>for Alexis’s that their well-worn strategies still work. She wants Alexis to be okay, and if—as appears to be the case—she’s inherited Castle’s trademark resilience, then that’s great news for everyone. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Glad as she is, though, she can’t seem to fall asleep. He nods off immediately, sore and exhausted, not just from what seems to have been hours scootering through the streets of SoHo, but also from the rigors of two days in a second grade classroom, including vicious marble-based attacks from his very own nemesis. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>For her part, she lies awake long enough that she’s spiraling a little. She’s worried that she’s projecting her own rusty coping mechanisms on to everyone else, and she’s worried that the nagging feeling that it <em>can’t </em>be that easy for anyone isn’t so much concern for Alexis as it is some weird kind of jealousy. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It gets to the point that staying in bed is a losing proposition. She’s well past it being logical to simply wait for her hamster wheel mind to tire itself out. She peels the covers off her legs and gropes in the dark for her robe on the bedside chair. She dithers for a minute between a soak in the tub or sneaking a spoon or two of the potato chip fudge ice cream that’s better than it has any right to be. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She thinks of Anton and ice cream is out. But the tub is likely to wake him. She sighs and cinches the sash of her robe tighter. Kitchen it is, if only for tea or some unfocused staring into the lighted confines of the refrigerator. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s the sound that draws her attention—not a sob, but a definite sigh coming from the hunched shape she hadn’t noticed on the couch </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Alexis?” she manages to keep her voice low and even, though she’s startled enough that her heart rate has run right up the mountain and not come down again yet. “What are you doing up?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Kate, did I . . .?” She composes herself quickly. She swings her feet to the floor and sits upright. “I’m sorry, I was just—“ </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She breaks off and Kate comes to sit beside her. “Staring into the dark?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“More or less.” She can hear a smile in the girl’s voice, though she’s betting it’s a thin one. “Which I can do upstairs.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I dunno.” Kate lifts her chin and looks around. “The dark out here is pretty good.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Pretty good,” she echoes and settles back into the couch with a sigh. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The quiet curls around the two of them. It’s not uncomfortable, but Kate wonders if she ought to break it. She wonders if it falls to her, but not for long. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I want to be a kid for him,” Alexis says slowly. It’s a statement that should be painful, but in her mouth is simply . . . considered. It’s that mixture of naiveté and wisdom beyond her years that Kate thinks of as being Alexis Three Years Ago, oddly enough. “I want to play and act like I think he’s invincible.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I want him to <em>be </em>invincible,” she interjects. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“That, too.” Alexis laughs. Kate’s eyes adjust to the dark. She can just make out pale hands worrying the fringe of the blanket he hates that somehow seems to hang around. “</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I think . . .” she pauses, not so much choosing her words carefully as groping for what she thinks is true. “I think he doesn’t need you to be a kid.” A shadow stirs in the alcove leading out of the bedroom. She can just make out an eyelash of light curving along his cheek, but their eyes meet. Despite the dark, she knows that their eyes have just met. “He just wants you to know you <em>can </em>be a kid. You can play and . . . be joyful, even when you’ve been through terrible  things.”  Her hand finds Alexis’s shoulder. She sweeps the hair back from it in a gesture that is entirely his. “But you don’t have to pretend for his sake. He doesn’t need you to act like you’re any more okay than you are.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“He doesn’t,” she says. Kate isn’t sure if it’s conviction or a mantra, but she’s surprised to feel a set of slender fingers work in between her own. “Thank you. Thanks.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Any time,” Kate says into the girl’s shoulder as they share a brief embrace. Alexis rises then and makes her way back upstairs. She seems lighter than the the huddled shape sinking into the couch not long go. Kate hopes she does, anyway. She rises in turn and goes to meet him where he stands, unmoving, near the bedroom. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I don’t, you know,” he whispers. “I don’t ever need  you to pretend.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I know,” she whispers back, even though she didn’t. Even though she realizes now all the things she’s been thinking, assuming, acting on, brooding over in private, mulling over as she stares into the superior dark of the living room.. “I know you don’t need that.”  </p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: This was meant to be a completely different object when I started. As ever, I am not in charge here. Hmm. </p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Tally—Meme is Murder (7 x 05)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>“I think we can both agree that this one goes in the Writer Solve Column,” he says with exaggerated smugness. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="">
  <p>“I think we can both agree that this one goes in the Writer Solve Column,” he says with exaggerated smugness. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She doesn’t respond. She keeps her eyes on the sidewalk as they make their way to the subway. She, paradoxically, wants the anonymity of the crowd, it seems. Or maybe she feels as if she ought to face the people she sees herself as working for—the surly, seen-it-all New Yorkers who are probably clicking <em>FOLLOW </em>on the NetSlayer’s Snappamatic feed even now. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Maybe this head-down walk, this descent into the roaring close confines of the station is about facing the  people she thinks she’s let down, even though Adam Lane will never see daylight again. She fell for the set up of Garrett. She let herself—the two of them—become a symbol of the department’s callousness, its ineptitude. That’s how she sees it. That’s what the subway might be about. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Whether it’s penance or peace enough to brood by she’s after, though, he’s having none of it. He’s already led her into infamy—immortalized with a tragically cheap cup of coffee in each of their hands, no less—and it’s his solemn duty to coax her out of her own head. So he pushes a little more swagger into his walk and has another go at baiting her. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Silence.” He gives her a sidelong look that’s brazenly patronizing. “I suppose that counts as a graceful concession on your part.  So, you’re welcome.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Welcome?” Her head swings toward him at last. She looks more preoccupied than annoyed, though—more sorrowful, and that’s no good, so he doubles down. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“For solving the case.” He brings a melodramatic palm to his chest. “For bringing my <em>considerable </em>literary gifts to bear—”</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Literary <em>gifts</em>?” There’s a sputter in there. There’s an incredulous laugh, and that’s a start. “Excuse me where were your literary gifts when I was breaking that <em>creep</em>?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She makes an anguished gesture toward a flat screen tucked up in the corner of a deli. There’s a reporter looking urgent in front of a building that is wholly uninteresting save for the fact that it contains Adam Lane’s basement hovel. The scowling image of Lane himself occupies the upper left-hand corner of the screen, and he doesn’t want to know what the chyron says. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He wavers for a moment. She’s unhappy. She’s carrying the weight of the world like always, only more so as every window, every screen in every hand of every New Yorker who brushes by them plays her failure back at her. He wavers, but annoyed is better than unhappy. Pissed is better still, and he’s committed to the bit now.  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“They were at the ready, of course.” He holds his hands up, thumbs touching, like a director framing a shot. “With my keenly honed senses, I stood at a distance, alert to the details that the killer—provoked most capably by you”—he bows as though he’s just bestowed upon her a great favor—“could not <em>help </em>but reveal.” He takes a dramatic pause. “Tiled walls and stale air—the critical narrative piece.”</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“That Garrett recognized.” There’s some snap in her tone. Some hollowness, too. It’s the centerpiece of the strategy—the haunting, evocative detail. It’s risky, but he thinks it’s right. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Yes, yes.” His fingers glance against hers, a hint of reassurance that he’s playing. He’s whistling in the graveyard and he’d like her to come along. “I’ll admit to an assist from the NYPD, active <em>and</em> retired. We’ll call it a half-tick in the Cop column. But it was <em>I </em>who realized the sinister poetry of Adam Lane bringing his sadistic story full circle. The dramatic rescue in an abandoned high school locker room? That is a full tick firmly in the Writer Solve Column.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“You mean Ryan and Esposito’s dramatic rescue?” She squints as though she’s doing the math in her head. “Plus Garrett and me. I count four in the NYPD column—active <em>and </em>retired.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“These are <em>solve </em>columns, Detective.” He makes a whisking motion with his fingers. “Everything afterward—your cuffs and your perp walks, all that busywork putting murders behind bars for the rest of their natural lives—that’s not even denouement. That runs over the credits.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Credits.” She shakes her head down at the sidewalk. She tips her chin up to the sky and draws in a breath. With concrete and glass, with steel and stone, with the sheltering cavern of a city street around them. She draws in a breath of late afternoon, autumn air and laughs. “I thought this was a <em>Writer </em>solve. There’s a filmmaker now, too?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“What can I say?” He shrugs and pretends to consider it. He reaches out and hooks his pinky around hers. “Richard Castle: Metaphors and Media . . . Mixed.”  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p> </p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: Skirting the edge of an object here; this was going to be more introspective about interiors, but then it wanted to be dialogue heavy. Feh. Hmm.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Simple Gifts—Time of Our Lives (7 x 06)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>The bands they chose months ago are simple. Hers was simple from the start—slender, gold and completely unadorned. For her, it had been a practical choice. She’s already disinclined to wear her engagement ring on the job, so something plain had made perfect sense. But it had been a sentimental choice, too. Her mom wore something utterly simple. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p></p><div class="">
  <p>The bands they chose months ago are simple. Hers was simple from the start—slender, gold and completely unadorned. For her, it had been a practical choice. She’s already disinclined to wear her engagement ring on the job, so something plain had made perfect sense. But it had been a sentimental choice, too. Her mom wore something utterly simple. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Her dad, for years after she was gone, wore its mate. It rests now, she knows, in a keepsake box on his dresser—one with a picture set in the lid of him and the love of his life with their arms around one another. When it had come time to choose something for herself, she had been . . . moved by the though of carrying such a quiet, quintessentially Beckett  tradition into the next generation.  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It had caught her unawares, the sudden emotion that had flooded her at the sight of something so seemingly nondescript, and yet exactly like her mother’s wedding band. She’s a little embarrassed about it, just like she’s a little embarrassed that the idea of wearing her mother’s dress never crossed her mind until Lanie, without a second though, brazenly called her dad and more or less demanded it. She is still—<em>still, </em>after therapy and something like closure and yet more therapy—stumbling blindly between anchor and homage, but she had chosen the ring with instant conviction.  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He, of course, had gone through every possible phase in trying to choose his. He’d looked at rings made of moon rocks and rings supposedly from debris at the site of the K–T impact, though he’d  moved quickly on from that one on the off chance of a <em>Jurassic Park </em>scenario where it might attract unwanted dinosaur attention. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p><em>There’s </em>wanted<em> dinosaur attention?</em></p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>
    <em>Are we shopping for wedding rings, or are we talking mammalian strategies in the event of an archosaur comeback? Because I have a list of alliances we are going to need to make. </em>
  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He’d gone through a <em>Star Wars </em>and  steam punk phases. She’d threatened desertion if he somehow found someone to make him a ring with a working steam whistle. He’d  looked at one hundred million iterations of rings made of metals folded and worked like a samurai sword.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She’d been shy about showing him her choice. She’d been bristly and spoiling for a little bit of a fight that surely would have drawn attention from the <em>why </em>of it. A little bit of a fight surely would have provided cover for her embarrassment at her unexpected, belated foray into sentiment. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But he’d gone quiet when she’d shown him. He’d gone absolutely quiet for one moment and no more. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p><em>That, </em>he’d said with the same certainty that had come over her.<em> I want exactly that. </em></p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>And that’s what they had gotten—a simple gold band and its mate. That’s what they have now in this flurry of activity. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Plain as they are, the rings have had quite a journey. Hers had found its way, at the height of their sorrow, from Alexis’s pocket to the little wooden drawer in his desktop organizer—<em>This is where he’d keep it. He’ll look for it here. </em>Lanie had folded his into her hand along with the full force of her fierce conviction—<em>We’ll find him, Kate. We </em>will <em>find him. </em></p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>And then they’d both found their way from her hand to the top of his dresser, in plain sight to show she meant it—<em>A month. </em></p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s been a month. It’s been just a little bit more than a month, and here they are. They’re doing this, and they need rings.  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Is it weird?” She senses him behind her long before her unfocused gaze registers his reflection in the mirror. “They’re engraved inside. The date—” She turns to face him, the rings clutched tight in her hand. “It’s weird. We should have new ones.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“We can have new ones if you want.” He trails his palms down her arms. “We can hit a mall or find a gumball machine or find . . . loose washers around the house—“ </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Loose washers?” She shakes her head at the very notion of stray hardware hanging about anywhere in this loft. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“My point is. We can do whatever you want to do.” He circles her wrist with his fingers and joggles her closed fist. The rings jingle merrily together and that’s her answer. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I want these.” She presses her knuckles to her chest as though he’s about to wrestle her for possession.  “We can have them . . . re-engraved later. Or something.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He doesn’t try to wrestle her. He kisses her instead. “I want those, too,” he says softly. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Sentiment sneaks up on her again when she takes her dad’s arm, when the two of them turn the corner, and she sees him waiting eagerly against the backdrop of a sunset in fiery pastels. It takes hold of her, and all she can manage is the shyest <em>Hi </em>ever uttered when she finally arrives to stand before him, before the judge, before this tiny, essential sliver of their family. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s a heady sensation, sliding the ring home on his finger. It’s a strange, simple, <em>moving </em>thing place it there and see far, far into the future. She is overwhelmed with joy, with satisfaction, with the ease that settles on her soul as he, in turn, slides its mate home on her finger. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>There’s a solid <em>click</em> when the simple band meets her engagement ring. It’s no ethereal, far off chime. It is the click of chess pieces on her mother’s battered old board, the slick, rainy day rattle of mahjong tiles on the dining room table. It is the latch of her mother’s briefcase, definitively closing  the instant before she pressed an insistent kiss to her daughter’s forehead and headed out to work. It is the single-measure melody of a simple gold band coming to rest on the edge of the kitchen sink. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It is her past and her future, united, and she is whole.  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p> </p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: The object is really that satisfying click. For serious. Hmm.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Cannikin—Once Upon a Time in the West (7 x 07)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>He’s got a thing for tin cups now. It’s an odd turn, to be sure. It doesn’t exactly fit the Richard Castle: Millionaire Metrosexual image, but there’s no fighting it. He definitely has a thing for tin cups. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="">
  <p>He’s got a thing for tin cups now. It’s an odd turn, to be sure. It doesn’t exactly fit the <em>Richard Castle: Millionaire Metrosexual</em> image, but there’s no fighting it. He definitely has a thing for tin cups. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It starts with a thing <em>against </em>champagne flutes, because he’s honestly kind of annoyed with Lanie and the boys. He’s annoyed with his mother for making such quick work of her first pour of the bubbly that it rendered her utterly incapable of reading the room as they tried to announce the most important thing that’s ever happened to either of them to the people who are supposed to be their closest friends. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He’s not annoyed for his own sake. Okay. He’s after-the fact annoyed with Gates for his own sake, because come on, in what universe does she—the woman who has been grinding him beneath her heel for going on three years—make the champagne toast cut? </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But when it comes to Lanie and the boys, he’s annoyed for <em>her </em>sake, because unalloyed girlish glee is not exactly her go-to emotion, and he hates—he just <em>hates</em>—the way it just dropped away as the first notes of their malcontent trio sounded. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>So it starts with that, his tin cup thing, and he’ll admit that a negative is not the best place for anything to begin. But she transforms it. She wipes away such an inauspicious beginning, because it turns out that she’s a whiz at making cowboy coffee in the enameled tin pot on the rickety wood stove in their room. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He’s a little panicked when she invites Tobias the not-quite-naked cowboy in so blithely. He’s on the verge of initiating some under-their-breath plan or concocting an elaborate excuse about there being a fish in the percolator. He’s on the verge of some diversion or other, when she swings deftly into action. She pours a cup for each of them, as though she’s in the Little Missus habit of fetching coffee, and he isn’t sure whether to brace himself for what <em>has </em>to be some truly atrocious concoction or puff up his chest and—Tobias be damned—remind her that in their household, <em>he </em>is the coffee fetcher.  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But it’s delicious. It’s not a perfectly pulled shot topped with his signature foam art, but it’s strong and rich. The smell is heavenly and the brew itself is an absolutely perfect accompaniment to the game-for-anything persona she puts on once she pegs Tobias as absolutely, stereotypically down to gossip.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s not exactly unalloyed girlish glee, but it’s damned close, and the warm tin cup in his hands is like a touchstone for the moment this whole madcap <em>impromptu-honeymoon-while-on-case </em>plan of his becomes something like fun for her, and something like work for him. And that seems exactly as it should be. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>And then there’s the tin cup wine by their campfire. They hold the memory of the stars in all their millions overhead and the press of her cheek against his shoulder. There’s the aborted cowgirl striptease, but aborted or not, not even a near-death experience with a rattler can ruin all that entirely. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Not even their highly inconvenient desertion by Ryan and Esposito and a long, hot, filthy walk back to the ranch can ruin it—though it does give him plenty of time to recall that he’s off champagne flutes and annoyed with the human counterparts to their fickle equines. But it also gives him plenty of time to think about her smile in the firelight and the pleasant ring of her tin cup against his as they toasted to where they’ve been, where they’re going. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>So he stashes them away. The dull silver ones from the pack he’d put together for their wagon trip mysteriously find their way the oversized leather dopp kit she likes to make fun of. When they leave their dismal bunkhouse room for the Grand Hotel’s honeymoon suite after all, a pair of the white enamel ones with their dented sides and chipped rims are consigned to the depths of his carry-on. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He feels ridiculous about it. He feels strangely guilty, though he’s reasonably sure that Daisy May Grady, stunned and apologetic as she is, would not begrudge him a few lousy tin cups. He’s reasonably sure that as she contemplates the rehab she’s going to need to do on her business’s reputation, she’d offer the two of them more or less anything their heart desired. But it seems like such a silly thing for his heart to desire.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It still seems silly when they’re home again. Their four donated honeymoon days have gone quickly, and they’re both a little blue about it—happy to be home, but a little blue, and that’s exactly as it should be, too, somehow. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She catches him in his crime almost immediately. The campfire cups rumble together just as he’s headed to the bathroom to remove them surreptitiously from the dopp kit and figure out what, exactly, he’s going to do with them until a decent interval has passed and he can casually introduce them to the kitchen cabinets. But they rumble together and she catches him by the back of the shirt. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“What’s in that thing?” She spins him to face her and there’s a world of hurt awaiting him in the arch of her eyebrow if he doesn’t respond. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Nothing . . . interesting?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She’s snatched the kit from his hands before the -<em>ing </em>leaves his tongue. She jerks the zipper open and hooks one cup, then the other by a finger. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Our campfire,” she says and it’s like the stars in all their millions are right there in the smile the memory calls up. “You stole these,” she adds sternly, but the stars don’t go anywhere. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I . . . neglected to return them.” He tries for an injured sniff, but the effort collapses. “I just wanted a memory.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She studies him for a long moment. She turns on one heel, the cups still hooked around her finger. She tosses the dopp kit on to the dresser in passing. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Where are you—?” He starts after her, but she holds up a hand. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Champagne,” she says over her shoulder. “We need to find out what champagne tastes like from these.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“A better bottle.” He hops on to the bed, sinking against the pillows with a comfortable sigh. “Get a better bottle than the one we wasted.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Duh,” she calls from the kitchen, and he can hear them. He can hear their campfire tin cups clanging merrily together.  </p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: I dunno. On this watch, the champagne toast pissed me off. Let the babes be happy with their cowboy coffee and their campfire wine. Hmm.   </p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Farceur—Kill Switch (7 x 08)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>She is worried about Esposito. They are all, obviously, worried about Esposito. But she is . . . specifically worried in a way she’s not sure anyone else is. She’s not sure anyone other than her would think to be worried in the way she is, but she and Esposito are, in many ways, of a kind when it comes to the job. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p></p><div class="">
  <p>She is worried about Esposito. They are all, obviously, worried about Esposito. But she is . . . specifically worried in a way she’s not sure anyone else is. She’s not sure anyone other than her would think to be worried in the way she is, but she and Esposito are, in many ways, of a kind when it comes to the job. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>There are precise pieces of the situation clicking into place for her that she doesn’t like at all—the enclosed space, the civilians, the fact that Jared Stone, gun or no gun, is not exactly an imposing target. It’s almost like dissociating. At a distance, she can see the moves she’d be sorely tempted to make. She can see how they would, in a likelihood, go terribly wrong. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But she can’t exactly say any of that out loud. She can’t—and wouldn’t—call his skills or professionalism into question, and truly, she has no doubt about them at all. She just has . . . specific worries, and it’s important that she keep them to herself. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>So she offers a wan smile when Castle is uncharacteristically discreet in hooking her pinky finger as he seeks to reassure her—<em>Hey, if anybody can handle it, Espo can. </em>She gratefully gathers up his conviction and doles it out again to Ryan, to Lanie, most of all, when she rushes into the bullpen<em>—Listen, he has been in worse scrapes than this. </em>She holds on to some of it for herself. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She needs it when Tory calls them in to view the situation in the subway car in real time. The fact that Stone doesn’t know about the camera is an advantage, to be sure, but she doesn’t like at all what she sees. She spies the transit cop at the same moment Lanie does and she’d like to find it hopeful thing, too. She murmurs something to that effect, because that’s what Lanie needs to hear.  But she also sees the gun in Stone’s hand and she’d bet anything that it’s police issue—the other cop’s, most likely, but it’s another troubling variable. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The hostages are, too, beyond just their existence. Her heart sinks at the sight of the pregnant woman and her desperate-looking husband. That’s a nerve-wracking dynamic, and she doesn’t like the look of either the sweating guy in the suit or the surly-looking kid. There’s no doubt in her mind that one’s a talker the other has exactly the kind of mouth on him that the situation does not need. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She watches with her fingernails cutting into her palms as Esposito approaches Stone. Her eyes are fixed on the tantalizingly loose grip the man has on the Glock. She can picture herself talking calmly, reasonably, just as Esposito seems to be doing. She can picture herself biding her time, waiting to make her move. And she can see it all going terribly wrong. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>And that’s all before the suicide vest and the dead man’s switch. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The vest makes no sense. It makes less than no sense here, above ground where they find that no one knows much of anything about Jared Stone. No one—literally no one—could have foreseen this turn. It’s a wildcard that narrows Esposito’s options to almost none, and she can feel the fury building in her. She can imagine all too well the way that same fury must be crowding out thoughts of anything but immediate action—taking Stone down hard, as soon as possible. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She’s afraid for him. She thinks about him going after Maddox with her, no questions asked, no plans made. She thinks about every ill-advised chase and take down he’s rushed into, she’s rushed into. They’re too damned much alike, and the stress of knowing that is slowing her down. It’s making her thoughts spiral and breaking her concentration at every turn. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She swaps Ryan into the subway car as a self-defense mechanism. She pictures him chatting Stone into submission, starting a support group for the other hostages then and there, leading the whole gang in campfire songs until a very confused HRT arrives and finds there’s no rescuing left for them to do. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She laughs to herself. It has a distinctly hysterical edge to it, but the tight fist that’s taken up residence in the center of her chest loosens a little. She overhears Castle tossing movie references Gates’s way, and it loosens  a little further still. She has to smile down at her phone, because it’s always a little wickedly funny when they’re smack dab in the middle of a crisis and he still finds a way to irritate the Captain. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The Captain, who is asking her something while she’s a million miles away, thinking about all the times he’s saved her from her worst, blackest moments with a well-timed, deeply stupid joke—<em>Do you know why I chose you as my inspiration for Nikki Heat? Because you’re tall. </em></p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She’s remembering all those times—too many to count—when her brain finally registers the Captain’s oddball question about pizza, and she has an idea, she has a plan, she has a strategy. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Pineapple, olives, and double jalapeños, sir.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s their loser pizza. When they play poker for no real money, on the rarer occasions when Ryan and Jenny talk them in to board games, at their boys’ nights when they play video games, they’ll order actual food plus one loser pizza for, well . . . </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Castle is careful in his approach. He’s been careful around her this whole while. He knows something is up with her. He knows it’s not the time to ask, and she appreciates how head down and diligent he’s been. But this sudden oddity must seem like a safe enough inroad. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Loser pizza?” He asks quietly. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Figured he could use a laugh,” she says. The ground feels firmer beneath her feet. She reaches out discreetly and hooks his pinky finger with her own. “And a reminder that he’s got to play to win.”</p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>  A/N: I am happy to have an explanation for that ‘pizza.’ Hmm. </p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Set Theory—Last Action Hero (7 x 09)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>She’s not not okay. But she’s not okay, either. He’s a long way from set theory and high school algebra, but he’s pretty sure there’s no equation to chart that out, but here they are. She smiles sweetly when he asks. She goes the extra mile to give him a reassuring touch on the arm, even though they’re just ducking under the crime scene tape, and that’s what seals it for him—the fact that she doesn’t automatically drop into work mode means she’s not quite okay. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p></p><div class="">
  <p>She’s not <em>not </em>okay. But she’s not okay, either. He’s a long way from set theory and high school algebra, but he’s pretty sure there’s no equation to chart that out, but here they are. She smiles sweetly when he asks. She goes the extra mile to give him a reassuring touch on the arm, even though they’re just ducking under the crime scene tape, and that’s what seals it for him—the fact that she <em>doesn’t </em>automatically drop into work mode means she’s not quite okay. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He gets distracted by Lance Delorca. He gets lost in a perfectly legitimate excuse to watch clips of their vic’s movies and give everyone the low down on who’s who. He gets so swept up in it that she shuts him out of the Kat Kingsley interview—literally. She pulls the interview door closed and snaps the blinds in his face, and it’s mostly all in good fun. It’s mostly that she’s judging his adolescent tastes and maybe even playing up the<em> as if </em>jealousy a little bit. But she’s also kind of punishing him for real, he thinks. She’s playing the way the two of them do on any given day, but she’s also being a little short fused and that’s another data point. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>More and more of those <em>rat-a-tat-tat</em> into place on the movie set. She rolls her eyes at the hokey green screen instead of soaking in the action vibe on the monitors where there are people bringing the scene to life in real time. She gets in a couple of jabs about Brock and his kimono, and . . . well, that’s a fair enough cop. A little Brock Harmon goes a long way. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But amidst the jabs, she engages. She comes over all nostalgic, and talks about the action stars <em>she </em>goes for, so it’s not like she’s withdrawn. It’s not like she’s full-on <em>not okay</em>, and yet she’s a little rough with him in the wake of the soul-crushing goat herder revelation. She’s merciless in keeping him from interrogation for her second dance with Kat Kingsley, and she didn’t <em>have </em>to tease him about the poster. Teasing about the poster was 100% optional, and she did it anyway. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>And yet she’s sweet with him in half a dozen other ways. She doesn’t make fun when he geeks out over Lance Delorca demolishing a gang of thugs. She, in fact, pins  Ryan and Esposito to the bullpen fencing with a glare when it looks like <em>they </em>might make fun. And she absolutely looks the other way to avoid catching him as he replays the footage on her computer. She teases him about going out for drinks, then throws her arms around him and says she’d never get between him and his boyhood dream. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She asks no questions at all about where his shirtsleeves went, although she’s only human, so he <em>does </em>get an arched eyebrow as she asks if his bare arms itch beneath his sport coat. She’s high and mighty about the recording. She wears the headphones like a sign of office and informs him in imperious tones that she is not rewarding him for his “semi-illegal” behavior. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But she has him in with the interview for Trey. It’s the two of them when they have their killer and it’s time for a movie set take-down, so all seems to be forgiven. She seems to have moved back into <em>fully okay</em> territory. She even—sweetly again—suggests they watch <em>Hard Kill</em>, and he doesn’t know how he got so lucky. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He thinks it’s okay as he makes his way home to set up their movie night. He still wonders what the not <em>not </em>okay was about, but it dawns on him with frisson of pleasure that they’re married now, and this might just be one of those everyday things. They’re so used to upheaval and drama and life-and-death, and whatever it is or was is just a bit of a blip that he should let go, rather than talking it to death as usual. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>That’s where he’s landed by the time he’s home. That’s where he’s landed when he sees the cheap, battered, scratched-to-high-heaven little skillet sitting out on the stove top. She hasn’t used it. He knows that, so that’s not why it’s out. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s out because it doesn’t have a home yet. There are built-in racks for every piece of All-Clad. They pull out and stack neatly and keep everything organized just so. And that means there’s no place—there’s literally no place—for her sad little, sentimental value pan. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He wonders what to do about that. He thinks about the Kat Kingsley poster he dug easily out of storage—everything of his in storage has its own particular place. He thinks about the three or four or six different versions of <em>Hard Kill </em>he has to choose from and where each of them sits on his media shelves. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He makes his way into his office and turns to the boxes of journals he doesn’t keep as regularly as he should. He has to close his eyes and think a moment. He pictures her hair, long enough to reach the collar of her jacket and a less aggressive shade than when he first met her. He remembers a park bench and two hot dogs and teasing her that he’d never get <em>Rina </em>to eat street food with him. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>They’d fallen into conversation. He’d <em>lured </em>her into conversation in those early days when they were finding their feet with one another after their first rupture. They’d worked their way backwards through movies that existed before Rina was born—before any of the models they’d encountered were born. He finds what he’s looking for, an incredulous notation with an exclamation point after it. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s good news. He knows where he can get his hands on the exact thing he needs. He knows where in the boxes they’ve stashed for the moment in the spare bedroom he’ll find the item he wants. He does have to run out. He has to explain in small words to a kid for whom the entire conversation is theoretical that, yes, he <em>does </em>want to hook a VCR up to a flatscreen TV made in this century. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But he’s set up by the time she gets home. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“What—?” She sees that he’s at the stove and the skillet before him is sizzling. She’s not sure what to make of it. “Castle, what’s all this?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Breakfast for dinner,” he says. He steps aside so she can get a peek at the fluffy yellow eggs. “Not your Nonna’s, I’m sure. You’ll have to school me.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“That’s sweet.” She steps behind him and presses a kiss to his shoulder blade. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Not <em>that </em>sweet.” He gestures with the spatula to the beverage choices lined up on the breakfast bar. “I’m putting you to work. You’re in charge of deciding whether beer or wine goes better with breakfast for dinner, or if I’m squeezing OJ for mimosas.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Wine.” She’s firm about it. It’s the voice of experience. “Wine pairs perfectly with afterthought scrambled eggs.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Wine it is, then.” He peers under the edge of the eggs. “These are just about done. Can you decant?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I can decant,” she laughs, picking up on the music of it. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She <em>does </em>decant, while he plates the eggs, the bacon from the warming oven, the buttered rye toast that she likes best with eggs of every variety. They make their way into the office, juggling plates and glasses, silverware and napkins. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She doesn’t register the odd AV set up until he has the clunky remote in hand. “What’s this?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“The year”—he crosses one leg over the other and takes up a Rod Serling pose—“is 1984. Young Richard Rodgers has watched <em>Hard Kill </em>a minimum of seventy-four times. Even younger Katie Beckett, is so into <em>Mary Poppins </em>that she has all but worn out her illegally dubbed VHS tape . . .” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He trails off dramatically as his finger comes down on the play button. The flat screen wobbles and labors. Big Ben appears and the titles begin. There’s the two-second splice of a game show from when her childish little fingers hit the wrong buttons. She smiles wide at him, at the screen, at her scrambled eggs. She’s okay. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p> </p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: Not sure how this got so long or where the heck Mary Poppinscame from.  I do know I want scrambled eggs right now. Poor little skillet.  Hmm.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Epic—Bad Santa (7 x 10)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>She has, on occasion over the last six years, mildly poked fun at his weakness for fancy writing implements and accoutrement. He has hundred-dollar pencils (no reproductions, thank you very much) out in a lumpy ceramic holder Alexis made him in third grade. He has pens of every known variety, and some varieties she’d never heard of before being introduced to a habit as serious as his. He has an actual vintage quill whose price point  he has steadfastly failed to disclose under her most rigorous interrogation techniques. And that’s all to say nothing of the ink and inkwells, the blotters and nibs and wipers. That’s all to say nothing of the paper. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="">
  <p>She has, on occasion over the last six years, mildly poked fun at his weakness for fancy writing implements and accoutrement. He has hundred-dollar pencils (no reproductions, thank you very much) out in a lumpy ceramic holder Alexis made him in third grade. He has pens of every known variety, and some varieties she’d never heard of before being introduced to a habit as serious as his. He has an actual vintage quill whose price point  he has steadfastly failed to disclose under her most rigorous interrogation techniques. And that’s all to say nothing of the ink and inkwells, the blotters and nibs and wipers. That’s all to say nothing of the paper. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She might, on occasion, have tweaked his professional pride by referring to all of it as his Theater of Writing. She has, from time to time, pointed out that she has hardly ever seen him set pen to paper since the earliest days when he stalked around the interrogation room, clearly doing nothing more than amassing a collection of workplace-inappropriate doodles.  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He tends to smile serenely in the face of her poking, her tweaking, her own theater of insisting on cheap ballpoints and half-used legal pads that have found their way home from the precinct. He writes her, in his flourishing hand, workplace-inappropriate notes with ink harvested from the dark side of the moon on paper made from the petals of a flower that blooms high up in the Himalayas once every seventh February twenty-ninth. He smuggles them from home to the precinct, and tucks them under her desk blotter with just enough sticking out to make her heart slam violently in her chest at the possibility that Ryan or Esposito might come snooping before it catches her eye. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>And now it’s the middle of the night and she is the snoop. She is duly chastened for all the times she poked and tweaked and leveled insults. She is rifling through every drawer and box and treasure chest full of elite writing paraphernalia in the loft, because she forgot about he damned Christmas card. She <em>forgot. </em></p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s not lost on her that Martha started working on her contribution in July. July, when—miracle of miracles—he came back to them. It’s a highlight, and she has no doubt that if anyone can knit together poignant, funny, eloquent and rhyming out of that, it’s Martha Rodgers. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>July is when <em>she </em>should have started working on her part. July is when he told her, reminded her, <em>informed </em>her in no uncertain terms that she was not ducking out of it this year. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She’d ducked out on it last year, because it’s still a lot for her. Doing Thanksgiving, having a training-wheels baby, that had all been a <em>lot</em>and she’d clumsily snapped that she wasn’t in the family yet. She’d hurt him and hadn’t known how to get herself out of the corner she’d painted herself into, and he’d let it drop. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She’s not ducking this year. She didn’t mean to duck, but she really did forget and now she is absolutely stuck. She has tried setting a timer and free writing. She has timelined the year and white boarded it in secret at the precinct. She has killed countless ballpoints and wound up desperately scrawling on the cardboard at the absolute back of a legal pad because she had managed to delude herself that she was on a roll. She was not on a roll, though she supposes most garbage <em>would </em>roll. And that’s where she is right now—snooping in the dark in her own home, contemplating the existential properties of garbage. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She’s finally settled on a pen at least. It’s a clickable fountain pen that he often dismisses as hardly counting as one, but she likes the low bar to entry. And she likes the ink, which seems to be some kind of russet brown. The paper with its rustic edges was probably breathed into existence by Bon Iver in collaboration with the Dalai Lama, and she’s counting on them for inspiration. She’s counting on the Theater of Writing answering her call for help. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The pen does move beautifully. It rests in her hand as though it was made with her specific fingers in mind. The paper drinks in the gorgeous ink, <em>et voila!</em> She has some world class, middle-of-the-night erotic doodles, and not a single line for the damned card. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Kate?” Her name comes out of the darkness, soft and furry with sleep. “What are you doing up in my drawers?” He frowns at the odd syntax and scratches at his scalp. “What are you doing up? My drawers can wait.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Can they?” She’s torn between laughing at how undone he is and seduction-as-defense. She doesn’t need him clapping eyes on her doodles or pursuing the drawer line of questioning any further. He already knows she’s stuck. She doesn’t need him finding out that she completely forgot, so seduction it is. “What if I think your drawers need immediate attention?” She’s slow about rising from the desk chair. She puts some swivel into each and every step as she crosses the room toward the bedroom door.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He’s not unmoved. He stands up straighter and his eyes pop open wide, for a second at least. But sleep still has hold of him, too, and he frowns. He reaches for her with more eagerness than elegance. He folds her in a clumsy hug. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“It’s okay to be stuck,” he mumbles against her shoulder with a boyish, generous, middle-of-the-night honesty that pricks tears behind her eyelids for some stupid reason. “Big year. Hard year.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Good year, though, too,” she says fiercely. Her thumb toys with the still-unfamiliar feel of her wedding band. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“<em>Super</em> good.” She feels the smile spreading across his face, blooming agains the soft of her neck. “Epic.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>And that’s it. She knows when he says it: That’s exactly it. “Epic.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p> </p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: I was gonna write about Lanie’s outlandish fakegagement ring, but I already did a confab with Espo about meeting the parents, and Beckett’s torn-off legal sheet for her contribution caught my eye. And . . . never actually made it into the story. Hmm.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Up Close and Personal—Castle, P. I. (7 x 11)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Shana Baker is, by far, not his first victim. But it feels like she is. It’s weird. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p></p><div class="">
  <p>Shana Baker is, by far, not his first victim. But it feels like she is. It’s weird. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“It’s weird,” he says to the woman’s office plants, which have lately been listening to his lament over being left behind. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>So that’s weird, but so are the plants. There’s some out-of-control beach grass-looking thing in coiled, woven-hemp planter. And there’s a . . . miniature tree. A single, slender trunk that rises, leafless, to an unruly crown and when he talks, it feels like they’re both listening. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He wonders if it was like that for Shana. He wonders whether she talked to the plants, how it felt to have the art of other people’s children—always other people’s children—framed and surrounding her day after day. He wonders about her like she’s his first victim. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The studio-shot picture of her and Sparkles the dog catches his eye. It’s a lonesome thing, like the weird plants and the framed children’s art, and he scolds himself being a writer, not a PI, until he scores the Kollar Trak lead.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He’s hot on the trail of Sparkles, hot on the trail of the large ginger man who is a Sparkles-haver-of-interest. He hugs the building edge of sidewalks as he moves quickly after the man. He finds himself concocting wild stories about Shana pleading for Sparkles’ life—not running, not resisting her murderer as he held the gun to the little dog’s quivering flank. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He finds himself being choked out, because he was thinking like a writer, not a PI. He finds himself pepper sprayed and hurtling face first into bags of rotting trash. He finds himself mentally apologizing to Shana Baker, his first—and apparently his last—victim. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He bounces back. The ginger man’s name is Jeremy, and he’s Shana’s friend. It is tremendously reassuring—and miniature-tree weird just <em>how </em>reassuring it is—that Shana had a human friend. And Jeremy, her human friend, guides his next step, </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It should never come to Perlmutter catching him. There’s a chart with a brief prelim and he’s seen a hundred of those, and then some. But there is also Shana’s undraped body, and that trips him up. It’s another miniature tree–weird moment, but he begins to understand. He is alone with Shana Baker’s undraped body. He is alone and in his hands, he has, in black and white and ballpoint pen the cold determinations Perlmutter has made about her death. He is never alone with these things—or hardly ever—and that’s what trips him up. That’s what has him lingering until Perlmutter inevitably shows up and there’s a <em>Tom and Jerry </em>chase around the  autopsy table. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But that sends him down his next road, deeper into Shana Baker’s life, as he hunts down her mother’s maiden name, the email she uses for her Facebook account, personal, not professional, and where she went in the last days of her life. He goes far down that road, and it’s hard. He’s excited by his leads. He’s invigorated at the thought of conducting an interview in his shiny new office, but he’s also exhausted and unnerved at being up to his elbows in this woman’s life. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He doesn’t do this. He is not the one who makes the hard phone calls or turns over the rock that reveals the victim was up to something  dirty. He doesn’t have to scour Facebook walls and wade through tearful, sincere and insincere, heartfelt and badly spelled <em>Rest in Peace </em>messages and ancient and not-so-ancient shared memories. He doesn’t, in general, have to worry about the ultimate fate of Sparkles the dog or who is going to water the weird office plants, if in fact, the weird plants need water. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Shana Baker <em>is </em>his first victim, and she isn’t He thinks back to Allison Tisdale, to Marvin Fisk, to Kendra Pitney. He thinks about Beckett fixing him with the glare he was already in love with by then, demanding to know what his angle was—<em>you don’t care about the victims, so you aren’t here for justice. </em></p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He thinks about who he was back then. He didn’t, in any real way, care about the victims beyond the vaguest and most distant regret at the loss of any human life. He <em>couldn’t </em>care, miserably and efficiently closed off as he was at the time. But, he came to care, quickly and in light of her example, because there was no other way. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But it was a game at first, and he sees now that in so many ways, it’s remained a game for him, because he pops in for the cool parts and ducks out for this kind of dogged deep dive into the lives of victims. But he can’t do that now, and there are times—there are so many times before Beckett slaps the cuffs on Nicole Morris in <em>his </em>office—when he thinks he can’t do this, He thinks maybe he shouldn’t—that he’s not cut out for <em>What happens to Sparkles? </em>and <em>Who gets the weird office plants</em>?</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He thinks maybe Shana Baker <em>should </em>be his first and last victim, but he also thinks there are other victims—maybe not <em>homicide </em>victims—but there are people who might need a writer who occasionally remembers to think like a PI. He thinks one way, then the other, then he doesn’t know what to think. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But she settles the question—his wife and his partner, no matter what. She tells him he impressed her. She hands him a huge box and he has no idea when she could possibly have stashed it way. She gives him a deerstalker cap and a magnifying glass and her blessing, and he thinks he has to do this for now. He thinks he at least has to try—for the sake of Shana Baker and the sake of Sparkles. For the sake of weird office plants that listen when the world is unfair, he has to try. </p>
  <p>
    
  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>image via<a href="https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.homeofthenutty.com%2Fcastle%2Fscreencaps%2Falbums%2F711&amp;t=MjQzMTM4YmQyNzgyMDlhMzhhZTAwYjA3ZWU0NTM5ZmYyNzVhYjc4Niw3MTI4NjllNzg0M2FlNWVhMDZkZWNmZjg5OTlkZWQxODRkZDZiYjZk"> homeofthenutty</a></p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: Uh. The office plants are weird. So. Weird. Also, I am losing the remnants of my mind. Hmm.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Junque—Private Eye Carumba! (7 x 12)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Sophia Del Cordova is cooling her heels in interrogation. Esposito and Castle are in observation, no doubt drooling over her and roughing out a first draft of a coming-soon femme fatale, respectively. Ryan is on dongle duty, trying to figure out how the hell one hundred million dollars fits into any of this. And she is standing in a dark corner of a low-traffic hallway, clutching a fake pistol to her chest. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="">
  <p>Sophia Del Cordova is cooling her heels in interrogation. Esposito and Castle are in observation, no doubt drooling over her and roughing out a first draft of a coming-soon femme fatale, respectively. Ryan is on dongle duty, trying to figure out how the hell one hundred million dollars fits into any of this. And she is standing in a dark corner of a low-traffic hallway, clutching a fake pistol to her chest. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She’s not shaking. She does not have permission to shake, because it <em>is </em>fake. It’s compact, sized for the woman who has a night on the town planned and nothing at her disposal but a clutch, appropriately enough, and it’s pretty obviously fake—too light, the proportions aren’t quite right, and the mechanics are stiff, despite the ornate, highly polished silver. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s fake, but he didn’t know that when he proudly handed it over, along with the Maltese Clutch as he’s he’s calling the purse now. That’s fake, too, not that it really matters here in the dark corner of a low-traffic hallway, because the knife Ryan and Esposito bagged and tagged at the scene where Harlan Mathis was holding him hostage was <em>not </em>fake, and that just doesn’t bear thinking about. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Her mind kicks that image right out and replaces it with a memory of him kicking down the Gemstar Studios dressing room door, with her to back him up. Her mind <em>much </em>prefers her own, very real gun raised and ready to face off against a rubber knife wielded by an aging soap opera star.  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She feels like she should call her dad and get started on twelve years worth of apologies for what she’s put him through every day of his life. Martha is second in line for that, of course, and when she gets to Alexis, she’s not entirely sure that she’ll be able to keep herself from a backdoor request for advice on tracking apps for his phone. And last, but not least, she’ll need to put in a call to him, because this is his every day now—or especially now, but it’s been his every day for years, and she doesn’t know how he does it. She doesn’t know how any one of them does it. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s ridiculous. She knows she’s being ridiculous, but the thing is—she never signed on to be a cop wife. It’s unfair, it’s hypocritical, it’s ridiculous, but that’s the truth of it. When she thinks about Jenny, about Evelyn Montgomery—even about Lanie, all too recently—a dark, not exactly admirable part of her thinks they’re terrible fools. A part of her thinks they should run, should’ve run, were smart to run, because who <em>would </em>sign up for that? And that very question is worse than ridiculous. It’s awful, and she doesn’t even know it this dark, awful part is really her. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Because it could be the trauma talking. She hates the notion as much as owning that cold, dark corner of her soul. She hates the idea that his disappearance and all the still-healing wounds it left behind have robbed her of her judgment—of her confidence in him, because he is and always has been as resourceful as he is reckless, and she knows that. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She knows he was born under a stupidly lucky star, but this is hard.Whether it’s the lingering trauma or she’s being suddenly smacked upside the head with her own critical lack of empathy, it’s hard to see him knocked around in a hundred little ways. It’s hard to admit that she’d be thrilled ti find him taking lost cat cases and background checks for the Learner’s Permit set. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s hard, with an obviously fake gun in her hand, to admit that she is not behind him all the way, if it means pepper spray and narrowly avoided torture by an amoral ex-marine. She’s not behind him all the way if it means dark corners in low-traffic hallways, trying to get her shit together while a suspect cools her couture heels. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s a her problem. That’s what she decides when it’s clear that she has to get on with it, that she has to do the job that strikes fear into the heart of people she loves. It’s a her problem that she is not—has not been—coping with this upending of their lives. Trauma or character flaw or—in all probability, both, plus whatever else is lurking in the dark, low-traffic hallways of her mind—it’s a her problem, so she’d best get on it. After she does the job, anyway. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She slips the gun into her pocket for now. She feels its slight weight and stiff mechanics and tells herself it’s fake as often as she needs to. She does the job. It turns out that Sophia Del Cordova is innocent of everything but overacting. The danger Castle was in was entirely fake. It’s not particularly reassuring, even before her husband and the Maltese Femme Fatale agree that deception and gunpoint come with the job. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s not reassuring, and this is hard. It’s a her problem and it’s probably complicated. She didn’t sign up to be a cop wife, but she can be the dame on his arm as the sun sets over the mean streets of the naked city. She can fake it until she makes it.  </p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: Huh. Well, the prop gun, and the rubber knife, and the blanks from the drone. This is weird. Hmm.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0013"><h2>13. Lambent—I, Witness (7 x 13)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>He is a fan of her enthusiasm for their inaugural “nap” in his new office. He knows it’s born, at least in part, of their previous, frustrated attempts, but that does not diminish his fandom one little bit. He very much appreciates the swivel she puts into the swivel chair and her commitment to affirming the sturdiness of not only the chair, but also his behemoth of an antique wooden desk. Her absolute confidence in the privacy afforded by the frosted glass panes of the outward-angled windows is also to be commended—and if she’s indifferent to privacy issues, well that definitely gets a gold star. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="">
  <p>He is a fan of her enthusiasm for their inaugural “nap” in his new office. He knows it’s born, at least in part, of their previous, frustrated attempts, but that does not diminish his fandom one little bit. He very much appreciates the swivel she puts into the swivel chair and her commitment to affirming the sturdiness of not only the chair, but also his behemoth of an antique wooden desk. Her absolute confidence in the privacy afforded by the frosted glass panes of the outward-angled windows is also to be commended—and if she’s indifferent to privacy issues, well that definitely gets a gold star. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He’s a fan of the nap for all the obvious reasons, as well as the surprises the never-obvious Detective Beckett had up her sleeve. But he’s a fan of this, too—of the after-nap that has them not so much swiveling as describing a slow, lazy arc that carries them into the shaft of street light, then back into shadow. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She’s in his lap again, wrapped in the shirt she’s commandeered. They have her coat draped haphazardly over the tangled two of them and they’re chatting quietly with the tick of the big, analog wall clock offering its constant commentary. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Will you frame it?” She gestures with the toes of one foot toward the mad man’s murder board still leaning against the window. She rolls her ankle in a sinuous figure eight, preening at the way the streetlight though the frosted glass silvers her skin. “Your first big solve.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“My first big <em>almost </em>solve.” He imitates her gesture with his own, considerably less elegant toes and she buries a laugh against his shoulder. “You want me to literally frame an innocent man?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I want you—” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She wriggles on his lap to sit up straight. It’s serious. She has a serious look on her face, but she’s <em>wriggling </em>in his lap. She has interrupted herself at the intersection of <em>double </em>and <em>entendre</em>.  He makes some kind of noise in the back of his throat. He’s going for a salacious growl, but again, she is <em>wriggling in his lap. </em>It has some definite squeak-like qualities. It wins him a particularly stern tweak of the ear, so he does his best to compose himself. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I want you to give yourself credit.” She takes his chin in one hand and directs his gaze back toward map with its criss-crossing riot of multi-colored yarn. “You followed <em>that </em>story, with all its twists and turns. You listened to your instincts when everyone else—including me—thought the case was closed.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Plus,” he reaches past her to pluck the oversized purple ball of yarn he, thankfully, hadn’t had to break into in order to map out all the players’ movements, “I made the lady who owns the yarn store downstairs really happy.” He moves to bop her playfully on the nose with the squishy mass, but she snatches it from his hand. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Castle,” she says sternly. She’s serious. She’s still serious, and he really likes that about this after-nap, too, even though it’s making <em>him</em>squirm, and not exactly in the pleasant, chair swiveling way.  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“You were right before,” he says, head dipping to avoid her eyes. “I let the case get under my skin.”</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“And I’m right <em>now.” </em>She lifts his chin. “Whether or not you stick with this. You did good work on this case.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He nods. He lays his cheek alongside hers and tries to let the words sink in. He tries, but his mind protests. It calls him out for the fact that Aubrey Haskins might very well have gotten away with two murders if it weren’t for the fact that Eva Whitfield—Eva Hendricks, really—had had his antennae up from the beginning. She’d had him right back in high school mode, where he’d dared not say no to her cheating off him, dared not say no to her film noir set up. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But she’d also made him want to believe, then and now, that he might someday be more than on the fringes of cool-kid group then, that he could solve the case and give her closure now. His mind wants him to believe that he’s been an idiot in the mold of Phillip Marlowe, with none of the fictional detective’s eventual savvy and signature detachment. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p> His mind has all kinds of stupid ideas, but the woman of his dreams is in his lap, the greatest detective he knows, and she thinks he did good work. She thinks he should frame his manic almost-solve, and in the after-nap glow, she’s more convincing than the chatter inside his head. The swivel chair makes its lazy arc, carrying them into the shaft of streetlight, then back into shadow. The tick of the big, analog wall clock offers its constant commentary, and the words sink in. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I did good work,” he repeats. He breathes a thank you into her skin, so soft that he’s not sure she can hear, so he’d best show her. It’s only sensible. He skims one hand up the sleek expanse of her bare thigh. He shrugs her coat to the floor and sets to work on the buttons of his own shirt, which looks better on her, and better still <em>off </em>her. “It’s the office. I do some of my<em> best </em>work here.”  </p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: There was a lot more talk about that yarn, but then I swatted Brain Poneh on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. Hmm.  </p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0014"><h2>14. Bespeak—Resurrection (7 x 14)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Today, she remembers to do her mirror check before she exits her unmarked and ducks her way under the crime scene tape. She doesn’t always remember. That’s a problem because, number one, the Castle–Rodgers clan should come with a hard on the wardrobe warning label, and number two, her dangerously observant co-workers think it’s the height of hilarity to scan her from head to toe each day to see—and/or to fabricate, as necessary—what’s been happening lately on the Family Circus, as they like to call it. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="">
  <p>Today, she remembers to do her mirror check before she exits her unmarked and ducks her way under the crime scene tape. She doesn’t always remember. That’s a problem because, number one, the Castle–Rodgers clan should come with a <em>hard on the wardrobe </em>warning label, and number two, her dangerously observant co-workers think it’s the height of hilarity to scan her from head to toe each day to see—and/or to fabricate, as necessary—what’s been happening lately on the Family Circus, as they like to call it. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>They tell her this new form of abuse is because she’s an old married lady now. They tell her that this is the only fun she brings to the table. But the truth is they miss him. The boys do, Lanie does. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>They all socialize more. They make a point of the Old Haunt and poker nights when they can, all of it early so Ryan can be home for what he swears is Sarah Grace’s bedtime, but they all know is his designated honey milk date with Jenny. But they all miss him tagging along on cases, and she, unfortunately, finds herself a the intersection of the nosiness that translates into and the constant assault on her work clothes by the Castle–Rodgers clan. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Martha’s specialty is the drive-by swipe of lipstick on the cheek, and it’s not like Kate owns an untoward amount of white, cream, or otherwise light-colored clothing. Too much at that end of the spectrum is an invitation to blood spatter and other undesirable substances a cop is likely to encounter regularly. But even with her penchant for blacks, greys, and darker neutrals, Martha favors a very bold, very <em>persistent </em>lip color<em>. </em>So on any given day  Kate might find it’s her collar, the placket of her coat or blouse, her sleeve that bears the imprint of her mother-in-law’s flamboyant affection.  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Martha stories are Ryan’s area of expertise, and he mostly deals in factual or close enough guesses. He is uncannily good at guessing what Martha might have been wearing from the shade. From the location of the smear—from whether Kate has been successful or unsuccessful at scrubbing it entirely from her cheek—he’s damned good at extrapolating Martha’s mood, at guessing whether she was rushing out or sleeping in. He’d actually stolen Kate’s thunder the morning she’d emerged from the elevator with a wide smile on her face. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>
    <em>Martha got that part? That’s great!</em>
  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Castle’s brand of havoc doesn’t really bear examination. He is hell on buttons, zippers, and any other kind of fastener. Each and every morning he acts as though it is his life’s work to immediately remove whatever item of clothing she has just tried to put on. And hands as large as his—as reliably clumsy in almost every other respect—really should not <em>also </em>be so devilishly fast and dextrous in this. For her part, she shouldn’t fall for his feints and misdirections as often as she does. He’ll go for her cuffs as though they are his sole concern and by the time she moves to slap his hand away, he has her whole top unbuttoned to the waist. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s practically a full-time job dressing and re-dressing herself to get out the damned door in the morning, and when she finally makes it to a scene, it’s Esposito’s awkward purview to point out that she’s managed to zip up part of an errant shirt tail, she’s missing a button here, there, and everywhere, or the she’s managed, in her distraction, to misalign every last fastener on her blouse, her blazer, her coat. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He’s not usually big on crafting a story to go with the day’s wardrobe malfunction. She’d be more grateful for that if she didn’t have the distinct impression that he stores them up and tries to make Castle’s ears burn when the boys have their no-girls-allowed video game nights. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Castle’s clothing-related disruptions, of course, require the investigative skills of no fewer than two people, of course. Lanie is on turtleneck, high collar, and unseasonal scarf duty. On the days when she’s feeling generous—or maybe on the days the boys have annoyed her enough that she’s not inclined to join in the games—she’ll simply toss a knowing smirk Kate’s way. On Kate’s less lucky days, there’s all manner of commentary on exactly how married life must be treating Detective Beckett. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She hadn’t thought about staying off Lanie’s radar today. She sighs at her reflection in the visor’s flip down mirror. She’s not even hiding anything. The white turtleneck she’d pulled on is perfectly weather appropriate, and it’s still going to bring her all manner of grief. She swipes on the flash light on her phone to at least do a lipstick check. A strategic smear might even be in order to jump start Ryan, who’ll want to know absolutely everything about Martha’s rehearsals. If Kate is lucky, he’ll refuse to yield the stage to Lanie’s Love Bite Theater. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But there’s nothing on her cheek or anywhere else she can see that would have a name in the jungle cat family or be mistaken for the title of long-forgotten erotica. And now that she thinks of it, Martha was too caught up in the prospect of her wardrobe fitting to give either her or Castle so much as an air kiss this morning. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But there’s a shimmer of something on the peach side of pink, just below her right cheekbone. <em>Alexis,</em> she remembers, and her hand halts in the act of swiping away the sweep of color. It was a sweet, sudden thing. A little thing for a member of the unrelentingly affectionate Castle–Rodgers clan, she’s sure. But for her, it was unexpectedly touching in the moment. It’s unexpectedly touching now.  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She almost wants to leave it. She almost wants one of them to guess—all of them to guess—that this morning on the Family Circus, she got a spur-of-the-moment <em>Bye, Kate </em>kiss from her stepdaughter. It’s a little thing, something she’d be too embarrassed to say out loud, even to Lanie, but it means something to her. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She doesn’t leave it, of course, that shimmer of something on the peach side of pink. She finds a napkin and wipes her cheek clean. She looks at the transfer of color on to the white. She folds it in half and tucks it into her pocket for safe keeping. It’s a silly, sentimental gesture, but it means something to her.  </p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: Hmm. This was going to be more about the “thinking about . . .  it” conversation. And then it was about lipstick. The grandmother I knew best was very much about leaving lipstick smooches. My other grandmother was ill—in a nursing home—for the short time I knew her. She didn’t wear lipstick. I wonder if she would have—if she did—in life before Parkinson’s struck. Double Hmm.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0015"><h2>15. Fleeting—Reckoning (7 x 15)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>She is not just a muse. It is a little known fact, but she is an artist in her own right, and mist is her medium—steam, fog, condensation of breath or the warmth rising up from a cup of coffee, a merrily boiling pot of pasta, the pounding, scalding water of the shower. Anything that leaves her with a fleeting cloud on a smooth surface to work with, she makes art of. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p></p><div class="">
  <p>She is not just a muse. It is a little known fact, but she is an artist in her own right, and mist is her medium—steam, fog, condensation of breath or the warmth rising up from a cup of coffee, a merrily boiling pot of pasta, the pounding, scalding water of the shower. Anything that leaves her with a fleeting cloud on a smooth surface to work with, she makes art of. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Her fingers are quick and certain—expert of course. She excels in this as in all things she sets her mind to. He has watched from afar, holding his breath, as she has sketched from memory the stark, gorgeous, leafless winter trees of Central Park on the latticed panes of her living room window. He has sat shoulder-to-shoulder with her, pretending not to notice that she’s doodling a child’s daisies and daffodils on the curved surface of a copper Moscow Mule mug. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>In the beginning, she would slap at his hands every time he’d huff a breath on to the passenger side window and make a move to swoop his initials across the glass. Every time, she’d tweak his ear—or worse—if he dared to make baby footprints with the side of his fist and the delicately applied tips of his fingers. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He’d assumed it was out of some in-character, by-the-book neatnik thing. He had grumbled under his breath that she was probably the kind of person who obsessively wiped fingerprints off her phone screen. But on their first stakeout—the first one she’d asked him to, not the first one she’d been <em>ordered </em>to ask him to—he’d watched in absolute amazement as she’d created a passable scale model of the solar system, Pluto included, in their mingled breath as it gathered inexorably on the windshield. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He had realized then that there was another explanation for her habitual violence in response to <em>his </em>artistic endeavors: Kate Beckett, Artist in the MIst, Simply does not like to share her canvas.  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Or she didn’t like to share it, once upon a time. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He has a different view of the artist these days—a far more intimate view.  He has let his arms go limp at her command and watched in awe as she takes him by the wrist and uses his fingers like brushes to paint a childhood landscape in the fog on the glass shower door as she tells him the story of her family vacation the summer she turned eleven. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He has pressed right up behind her at the en suite’s double-sink vanity. He has rested his chin on her shoulder and held her fast around the waist as he reads out loud the dirty limericks she writes for him, in the fog on the bathroom mirror—because she’s not just a visual artist, of course. She encroaches on <em>his </em>territory, however fleetingly, with regularity. She writes him unabashedly passionate love letters and poems so sweet and tender they make him ache all the way to the soles of his feet. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He has felt his heart pound with positive teenage joy when he approaches to swap her dwindling cup of coffee for something fresh and full, only to find her breathing frost flowers on to the windows of the loft so she can write <em>KB loves RC </em>in a swooping heart with a fletched arrow piercing it on the diagonal. He has loaned her his strength from time to time, reaching past her to finish the final <em>n,</em> the final <em>a</em> in <em>Johanna </em>when the sadness overtakes her. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He has had the rare and wonderful privilege of a thousand brief glimpses of timid messages that she swipes away with a shy hand, just after she’s absolutely certain he’s seen them. He has come to keep a close eye on the things she says in this most ephemeral of media, when she wants to talk about something, but she doesn’t want to talk about it just yet—<em>Dating, Babe, Home, Our Bed, A Month, There’s No Wrong Time  Either. </em></p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He has come to love how playful she is in this way, and how contemplative, bold, open-hearted, even in the moments when he knows that’s hard for her. He has come to be the number one fan of the artist and to eagerly look forward to the next time inspiration strikes.Most of all, he has fallen every bit as much in love with Kate Beckett, Artist of the Evanescent, as he ever was with Kate Beckett, NYPD. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>And now he is standing on the curiously deserted New York street where she isn’t. He is standing at the rear of her abandoned car, trying to convince himself that he should be grateful there’s no body in—there are no bullet-riddled door panels, and no blood rising out of saturated upholstery to pool on the seats. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Logic, cold and implacable, is trying to take the reins and steer him in the direction of what <em>is </em>there, rather than what is not. His eyes dart around in search of anything. But then the streetlight catches the car’s back window. He moves just so and the streetlight catches it, two words in all caps, sketched into the mist to leave him nothing more than their ghost<em>—HELP HER!</em></p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The streetlight catches the sloppy, sadistic message in the mist, and he is enraged. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p> </p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: Kate Beckett definitely draws in fogged-up surfaces. Hmm.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0016"><h2>16. Koan—The Wrong Stuff (7 x 16)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>They’ve been talking about finding a better home for Buddha since the day Buddha moved in. They’d laughed about it at first—the fact that the movers had parked him right inside the door, hardly clear of the coat closet. Guard Buddha, they had called him, knowing the location was only temporary. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="">
  <p>They’ve been talking about finding a better home for Buddha since the day Buddha moved in. They’d laughed about it at first—the fact that the movers had parked him right inside the door, hardly clear of the coat closet. Guard Buddha, they had called him, knowing the location was only temporary. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But it had turned long-term a while back, and now it’s a puzzle, rather than something to chuckle over. It’s something they keep meaning to do, but never quite get around to doing. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“It can’t be good for him,” he says more days than not as he pulls on his jacket preparatory to following her out the door. “Chaos looking right down on him.” He shakes his head scowls at the painting she knows he doesn’t exactly love. “It can’t be good.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Buddha is fine,” she says, and more often than not she has to tug at his elbow if they’re ever going to actually make it out of the loft. “Chaos rolls off him. Serenity his his thing.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Not much of <em>that </em>lately,” he is inclined to grumble, and it’s perfectly true. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Serenity, along with privacy, predictability, normalcy, is in short supply at the loft these days, and she wonders if it really bothers him. A lot of the time she knows it shouldn’t bother him, and she’s pretty sure it doesn’t—not <em>really</em> anyway. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Alexis playing late-night laser tag with a cute boy should have him puffing up in his Papa Bear routine, of course, but it should also have him heaving a sigh of relief, because the weight of sorrow and worry she’s been under since he disappeared seems to be lifting. Martha inviting gentlemen callers to avail themselves of his pajamas should definitely have a petulant <em>ick </em>factor for him, but he worries about Martha, too. He hates to see her writing herself off as too old for anything. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But some of the time, he seems genuinely on edge. He seems genuinely short tempered and bothered by the loft’s rough and rowdy vibe of late. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Maybe it’s an act.” She raises the issue quietly with Buddha on a rare morning where she’s the first one up and the scent of coffee doesn’t spark a sleepy stampede. “Maybe he likes the chaos and he’s just playing it up.” She lifts her eyes to the golden rain of gingko leaves, and a blotted-out sun and it seems like a possibility. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“What . . . up?” The befuddled question is all but swallowed up by a huge yawn. It’s forgotten in a sloppy, grateful smile as she steers him toward a seat at the counter and slides a mug of coffee his way. “Mmm. Quiet.” He takes a contented sip. “Nice and quiet.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s an unfortunate incantation. There are sudden bare feet pattering overhead. There are actual, high-heeled feathery mules tapping along the hallway upstairs. There is chatter that grows louder and louder as Martha and Alexis approach. He grips her hand for a desperate moment. He gives her a look that’s equal parts apology and plea. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Not quiet,” he whispers, and it’s on the miserable side, but Martha and Alexis arrive and he switches himself on. He’s in dad mode, son mode, eager-to-please-and-be-pleased mode. It happens so quickly she thinks she must’ve imagined the misery. She’d believe it if the bones of her hand weren’t sore. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She pours coffees all around. She murmurs that she’d better get dressed and leaves the three of them to their chatter. She trails a hand over Buddha’s top knot on her way to the bedroom. “Maybe not an act,” she confides. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s both–and. That’s what comes out over dinner. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Maybe I was wrong.” He has to raise his voice to be heard over the noise of the bustling, brightly colored dining room. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“You usually are.” She opts to go up on tip toe, to cling to his arm and speak right in his ear as they wait for the host to decide which table to give them. “What are you wrong about this time?”  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Buddha.” He gestures to one, two, six, sixteen happy Buddhas in sixteen different styles, arrayed around the place. “He seems pretty into the chaos.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s her opening, she decides. She waits for them to get settled at their table, then takes it. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Are you?” She plucks the menu from him and takes his hands in hers. She doesn’t elaborate. She lets hm take the question as he will. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Am I into chaos?” He toys with her fingers. He’s playful for a moment, but he sees she’s serious and he follows her down the same path. “Chaos is . . . welcome.” He smiles at her. There’s genuine happiness in it, and it’s frazzled around the edges. “And it’s hard.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Hard because . . .?” She trails off, lest she lead the witness, but she wonders if it’s hard because of her—because he’s worried that <em>she’s </em>not into chaos. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He squeezes her hand, though. He shakes his head, and it’s not that. He doesn’t feel like he’s in the middle of her and his family’s tendency toward the rambunctious, and she’s glad about that. She’s glad it’s so easily dismissed. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Tyson’s stalker wall went back years,” he says suddenly. “He watched us for <em>years.</em> And all those people who followed him—Marcus Gates and Amy Barrett and Carl Matthews and what if we come home one night and one of his left-behinds is in my pajamas?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>His voice is loud, louder, loudest as he goes along, but all the same it is gobbled immediately up by the noise surrounding therm. It is <em>consumed </em>by chatter and light and a cacophony of color. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Can’t happen,” she says, every bit as loud. “Will <em>never </em>happen.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“How do you know?” It’s plaintive. He wants to believe. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I know.” She shakes her fingers loose from the grip he has assumed on them. She snaps open her menu and slides his across the table. “We’ve got a Guard Buddha.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p> </p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: Buddha head. He’s got a lot to think about. Hmm.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0017"><h2>17. Ditto—Hong Kong Hustle (7 x 17)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>He thinks that if he had written Zhang as a character—if he had written the particulars of Henry Graham’s murder into one of the Nikki Heat books—he’d have ended up scrapping the whole damned thing for being too on the nose. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="">
  <p>He thinks that if he had written Zhang as a character—if he had written the particulars of Henry Graham’s murder into one of the Nikki Heat books—he’d have ended up scrapping the whole damned thing for being too on the nose. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He doesn’t really see it as anything more than an unfortunate coincidence at first. She is uncharacteristically forthcoming about the problem with the newly minted Captain Klemp, and he’s not a fan of the way he muffed that entire interaction by assuming that she wanted to dish on an enemy or a friend who’d failed his way upward. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The smallness of her voice when she admitted she feels like she’s fallen behind is still rubbing his heart raw when they get to the crime scene, and he stumbles again. He means to tell her that he’s been there—that he has any number of postgraduate degrees in professional envy—but it comes off as dismissive when he calls it Patterson Syndrome. It make her laugh, and that makes him hope she’s bouncing back from the Klemp Catastrophe, but he wishes he could strike the right note here. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He especially wishes he had as the Zhang situation develops. He’s delighted by the legend of Zhang while it consists mostly of Ryan and Esposito eating a little humble pie. He is less delighted once it includes her impressive personnel file and Gates’ rapturous tones when she hands it over to Beckett. But it still seems like little more than an unfortunate coincidence that’ll need just a touch of course correction on his part.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>That’s before Beckett turns into him.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It happens at the Jade Temple and it’s like a slow-motion car crash. Zhang is beyond pushy, beyond abrasive, beyond out of her <em>you-are-here-as-a-professional-courtesy </em>lane, and it knocks Beckett back. It has her scurrying across the restaurant, stiff armed with her badge extended before her. It has her standing, gaping, deprived of her witness by this week’s Special Guest Villain, who seems to think she’s Gotham’s OG Caped Crusader. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>That’s when the hard, terrible truth comes out—she’s been web-stalking Zhang. She has some company in her gaping, then, as she zooms in on the husband, on the adorable children. Lord knows his jaw more or less hits the white tablecloth, because when did she even have <em>time </em>to web-stalk Zhang? More important, how is possible that she does not realize that her completely baseless feelings of inadequacy have taken her deep into Richard Castle territory? </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He doesn’t have time to ask his rhetorical questions. He barely has time to recalibrate his Sense of the Problem Sensors before it’s not just Zhang, but the damned case itself that’s pushing her buttons like a bespoke button-pushing thing. There’s a swaggering FBI agent in a who does everything but actually <em>Little Lady </em>her in his outside-his-head voice, and it’s almost a shame he holds back. He thinks, quite possibly, that finding the absolutely most creative way to murder a man with a bolo tie might go a long way toward renewing her confidence in her inimitable bad-assery.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But Glassman does, just barely, hold back and the federal meddling stings. It echoes off wounds in the distant and not-so-distant past and he knows she must be thinking how differently this would be going down if she’d played it smarter and held on to the DC job.  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He knows by the time the girls’ night comes up that Zhang and Henry Graham’s murder are entirely too on the nose for any unnecessary interaction with Zhang to be a good idea. But she goes. He gets waylaid by the boys and ends up doing an informative bit of self-owning. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p><em>This is my </em>third <em>marriage. I think I know what I’m doing. </em></p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But the thing is, he kind of doesn’t. And the boys are idiots—who, by the way, got simultaneously disarmed by Zhang, and he is in no way going to let them forget that—but the condescending assertion that people in a relationship need space is, coincidentally, on the nose. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He can’t fix the problem of Zhang for her. He can’t undo the fact that Henry Graham has got to evoke Mike Royce, that flying in the face of federal directive to stand down in the midst of a murder investigation is exactly the reason she got turfed by the Bureau, and by extension, exactly the reason she feels like she’s treading water at the NYPD. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He’d like to highlight–delete the whole damned thing for her, as lazy and trite a literary conceit it is, but he simply can’t. So he waits it out. He hangs back and bites his tongue when she gives him the whispered download about Zhang’s fraying marriage. He <em>doesn’t </em>suggest the couples web-stalking he would be very much into. He nods in sympathy as she explains how Zhang feels responsible for Henry’s death. He hangs back and gives the two supercops space to do their thing. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It turns out to be a painful thing—a collar that brings precious little satisfaction to anyone, but they both know how that goes, and at least they’ll bring down Mimi Tan. At least Zhu Yin will be free, as Henry had wanted her to be. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>When he sees her with the laptop in bed, he wonders for a fleeting second if she’s given into the temptation again. He wonders for a fleeting second whether she’s him again and what on earth he’ll do about it. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She is him, sort of. She’s <em>not </em>web-stalking Zhang and her estranged husband. She’s not wondering if the juiciest details will be in Cantonese or the good old English-language tabloids. She’s writing, though.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She’s highlight-deleted Zhang and Henry Graham and all the on-the-nose resonances of the last few days. She’s pulled the thread and unraveled the problem and she’s starting with a list. That’s more her than him, of course, but there’s something else that’s the two of them together. It’s him plus her plus the accumulated lessons of the mistakes they’ve made. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She’s looking him in the eye and making the promise that he—that <em>they</em>—rank high, and any choices she makes about her career will happen in the full light of day this time. He feels unexpectedly a little teary. She’s pulled a thread within him, too—one that in his concern for <em>her, </em>he hadn’t realized needed to be pulled. He’s a little teary with relief. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s him plus her.  </p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: The object is Beckett’s browser history on her phone? Hmm</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0018"><h2>18. Devoir—At Close Range (7 x18)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>She stands outside the men’s locker room door with her fist poised to knock. She stands there for such a long time that her arm starts to ache from the awkward almost pose. She’s not sure knocking is wise. She’s not sure she’s the man for this job, figuratively or literally, but there’s not exactly anyone else and the job isn’t going anywhere. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="">
  <p>She stands outside the men’s locker room door with her fist poised to knock. She stands there for such a long time that her arm starts to ache from the awkward <em>almost </em>pose. She’s not sure knocking is wise. She’s not sure she’s the man for this job, figuratively <em>or </em>literally, but there’s not exactly anyone else and the job isn’t going anywhere. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She doesn’t knock in the end. Anyone who thinks she’s trying to sneak some kind of creeper peek can get over themselves. Anyone who is scandalized by her presence can turn in their badge. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But there’ll be no resignations tonight. There’ll be no pearls clutched or towels hastily pressed to exposed naked bits. The room his empty except for the reason she’s here. The room is empty except for a blood-soaked Kevin Ryan, who is sitting on one of the hard, narrow benches staring intently at drain set in a tile floor. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Hey.” She speaks softly, from a few feet away, hoping not to startle him. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Hey,” he says, sounding anything but startled—sounding absolutely toneless. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“You were right about Lopez.” She takes a step nearer to him.  She eyes the space next to him, the bench across from him, on the other side of the world’s most fascinating drain. She thinks she should sit, but she can’t decide where, so she stands. “He gave us a face to go with your grey suit. He’s a good witness.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Good,” he repeats, as though the word—the very concept—is alien to him, but he rouses himself. He shakes his head and presses his hands together. It’s a prelude to straightening his shoulders. A prelude to <em>Right. Let’s go, </em>but he’s not there yet. He’s just not there, and there’s so little she can say. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She sees his tie dangling from one limp hand. She sees an unpleasant, stuttering series of cuts across the knuckles of the other. She wonders for a fleeting moment what the story is there—if it was a wall or a locker or a convenient car door that he slammed his fist into. She almost asks. It’s on the tip of her tongue, but it’s such an Esposito thing to steer the conversation into the safe waters of things they’ve punched in the heat of the moment. And Esposito is not the man for the job. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Probably a good idea to get out of the rest of that.” She finally takes a seat across from him. She can see the lapels of his jacket are shiny with still-wet blood. She can see the Rorschach blots of rust red on the light grey stripes of his dangling tie. Worst of all, the dark, dark stains all the way up to the white, open throat of his shirt. “Something in your locker you can change into?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Change. Yeah. I’ll get changed.” He makes no move, though. He has moved on from the drain to the tie. His eyes fix on the narrow end, pointing downward, circling a little with the transfer of energy from his shaking hands. “Jenny hates this.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“The . . . tie?” The question tumbles out. It’s absolutely stupid, and she wonders if it’s too late to get Esposito in to do the job instead. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Ryan laughs, though. He snatches up the end of the tie and balls the whole thing in his injured fist. It hurts. She sees him wince. She sees the individual, stuttering cuts ooze fresh blood, but he’s still laughing. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Yeah. Hates the tie.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He meets her eyes for the first time, and it’s rough. There’s still a grin on his face, but it’s tight and hard and wrong<em>. O</em>f all of them—even Castle—Kevin Ryan is the most untouched by the job. He is the most hopeful, the most trusting, the most likely to see the good and the possible in any situation, and every facet of that has taken a hit tonight. Every fundamental part of him has taken a hit, and there’s so little she can say. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Let me ditch it for you, then.” She extends a hand, palm up. “Let me take care of all of it.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He looks bewildered for a moment. He looks down at himself, and it’s as if every sensation makes itself known at once. His eyes go wide at the sight, his nose wrinkles in disgust. He plucks at the sodden white fabric sticking to his skin  and looks like he might be sick. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“A minute.” He stands, a little unsteadily, and presses the tie into her hand. She manages to keep her face neutral, but it’s not easy—the stiffened patches where the blood has dried pairs nauseatingly with the tacky feel where it hasn’t, and it is <em>not </em>easy. “Give me a minute.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He peels off his jacket and thrusts it at her, straight armed. She takes it and turns the thing awkwardly, trying to find a way to hold it that brings her least in contact with the wet parts. Ryan, meanwhile, fishes in the open locker behind him and comes up with a dark shirt—an NYPD turtleneck. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He spins to face her, the shirt clutched to his chest. The sight is comical. A little comical, anyway, when she contemplates what she worried she might be facing when she burst into the men’s locker room without knocking. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I need—” he blanches as though the scent of blood has just hit him again. “I should shower.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“You should. I’ll take this. I can get—“ She stands abruptly and leans toward the door as though she’s about to get a running start. “Your shirt. I can wait. Outside. For it.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She does get a running start, practically, but Ryan’s  voice stops her. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Beckett?” She turns. He’s not clutching the dark turtleneck to his chest like a scandalized maiden anymore. It dangles from one limp hand at his side, though he lifts his chin and squares his shoulders. “Thanks.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She gives him a sharp nod and continues on her way. She more or less trips over Castle, who may or may not have had his ear pressed quite recently to the door of the men’s locker room. Whether he did or didn’t he is unashamed. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“How’d it go?” he asks quietly. “How’s our boy?”</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“A little less . . . boyish,” she says with a tight smile that dissolves more or less immediately. “I don’t know. I didn’t know what to say.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“There’s nothing <em>to </em>say. Not to <em>that</em>.” He reaches out toward the grisly bundle she’s holding, but his hand falls short of actually touching it. “But you were there. That’s what matters.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I was there.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She exhales noisily and leans against the wall, waiting for Ryan to hand off the last sense-surround reminder of his ordeal tonight. Castle takes up his post next to her and they wait. They are here. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She’s not sure she believes that’s merely <em>being here</em> is what matters in a moment like this, but she’ll hold tight to the grisly bundle so Ryan doesn’t have to. She’ll get rid of the blood-stained tie that Jenny hates. She’ll do what needs doing for their boy, because she is the man for the job.  </p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: At least Ryan’s 2-week-anniversary tie wasn’t cruelly destroyed. This is booooring. Hmm</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0019"><h2>19. Sidestep—Habeas Corpse (7 x 19)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>She is loquacious tonight. He’s not surprised by that in any absolute sense. He’s known for a while now that Kate Beckett, in the right frame of mind—in the right . . . position—is quite the talker. But she’s being professionally loquacious, and that’s definitely surprising. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="">
  <p>She is loquacious tonight. He’s not surprised by that in any absolute sense. He’s known for a while now that Kate Beckett, in the right frame of mind—in the right . . . position—is quite the talker. But she’s being <em>professionally </em>loquacious, and that’s definitely surprising. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>They have long since ducked Archie Bronstein and his hat into a squad car. The Hammer has almost certainly arrived at his next stop on his tour of Criminal Justice Land, but somehow the two of them are still caught up in the boring, end-of-case details he usually likes to avoid. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It starts with the phone call she insists on making right there on the street in front of the studio. He wanders a few feet off and watches, amused, as the production team for Archie’s commercial, having clearly done a collective <em>whaddayagonnado?</em> shrug, starts rolling out lighting kits and the rest of the tools of the trade to the van taking up most of the curb space, as though the stars of their particular show are routinely carted off by law enforcement. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She still has the phone to her ear when the last black-clad crew member gives him the hairy eyeball and emphatically turns the key in the outer door’s lock. He moseys back toward Beckett and gives her a questioning look. She gives him a <em>whaddayagonnado? </em>shrug of her own, but the eternal call ends a moment later, and she beckons him toward the car. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Isn’t the hotel that the benefit . . .?” He points back the way they were just facing when she pulls a sharp U-turn. “And the the loft is . . .” He tries to get his bearings. “If you want to change, the loft is—”</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“But the morgue is . . .” She gestures through the windshield. “I convinced the NTSB to send someone to take a look at the dummy.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“You’re going to talk to NTSB tonight?” He’s even more surprised than he is dismayed at the prospect of what sounds like a very dry conversation. Okay. He’s at least as surprised as he dismayed. “<em>Tonight,</em> tonight?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Yes<em>, tonight, </em>tonight.” She drops her voice, mimicking him. “Before Modesto can pull anything.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s a plausible explanation. Calling Modesto to accounts after five years living with the guilt regarding his complicity is what Richie the Pitbull literally gave his life for. It is on-brand for Kate Beckett to do everything in her power to honor the victim. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But there’s the matter of timing. There’s the matter of her verbosity, which at this point, seems to be wearing out even the NTSB guy, and the NTSB guy is definitely the kind of talker one usually finds consigned to the outer reaches of an accounting cube farm. And there’s the fact that she keeps glancing at her watch, and not in a <em>gotta go </em>kind of way. She keeps looking at her watch, and it dawns on him that she’s stalling. The surprisingly loquacious Detective Beckett is <em>stalling</em>. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Guilt seizes him at first. He thought he’d managed a graceful withdrawal for the two of them from the competition with a little help from Jimmy Kimmel and a costly favor to be named later, but maybe she still feels like her reputation is going to take a department-wide hit, courtesy of  the gauntlet he unthinkingly threw down. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But the more she draws out the process of giving her statement, calling him over to give <em>his </em>statement, making the NTSB guy go over<em>both</em> their statements, including the second interview with Elise Resner, it just seems like . . . stalling. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He calls her on it in the car. He hardly has to. She settles into her seat, she fastens her belt. She needlessly fiddles with the mirrors, and even after the key is in the ignition, she doesn’t turn it. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“You don’t want to go.” He studies her profile, gives her a moment to respond, but she doesn’t seem inclined to take it. “To the benefit. Even though there’s no chance of you splitting your dress—”</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I hate schmoozing,” she blurts. She turns to him, looking equal parts horrified and relieved that she’s said it. “I’m taking the Captain’s exam. I’m trying to take the next step, whatever that is. And I should go. I should schmooze. But I hate it.” She gives <em>him </em>a moment to respond, but he waits her out. “It’s not fun,” she says at last. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“So let’s not go.” He makes a show of looking at his watch. “It’s late. And that NTSB guy was a <em>talker.</em>”  He rolls his eyes. “Who knew there’d be so much to say about a dummy?”</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Nice try.” She gives him a grateful smile. She reaches over the gearshift and grabs his hand. “But there’s still at least an hour and a half left in the damned benefit, and I’ll have to hit the precinct—”</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Then we go do something fun for an hour and a half.” He looks out the window for inspiration, but with her right hand in his left, all the inspiration he needs is in this car. “We go dancing. Hit the precinct afterward, and no one’s the wiser.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She doesn’t fight him on it. Not for an instant. It’s glorious and a little bit sad. He thinks about her aspirations, her role models. He thinks about Roy Montgomery and the fun he got to have as Captain. But he knows she’s wise in seeing more of Gates in her future, because she’s a woman—because he’s stood witness to the way she has to fight to be taken seriously every day in such unexpected ways. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He makes a vow to himself as he twirls her across the dance floor to Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Glen Miller. He makes a solemn vow, as the loquacious Kate Beckett whispers and laughs nonstop in his ear, that wherever she goes, whatever path she follows, he’ll be the dummy who eases the burden of schmoozing when he can. And she will never want for fun. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p> </p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: I guess the object is the dummy? I thought it was the trophy. Brain Poneh dissents. Hmm.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0020"><h2>20. With One Blow—Sleeper (7 x 20)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>There’s something wrong with his hand. There has been something wrong with his hand since his completely reckless, unsanctioned, solo run-in with Ilya Golovkin in a dark alley. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="">
  <p>There’s something wrong with his hand. There has <em>been </em>something wrong with his hand since his completely reckless, unsanctioned, solo run-in with Ilya Golovkin in a dark alley. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He’d blown it off the night of—<em>It’s nothing. A little cut</em>—and she’d let it go. She’d pretended not to notice him wincing, shifting his wine glass carefully to his left hand, getting up in the middle of the night to root around for ibuprofen. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The cut is gone now. It’s healed up, and the skin there on his knuckles is just a little pink in certain lights. But there’s still something wrong with his hand. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He’s writing again, so that’s good, but his already eclectic typing style has taken a hit. He’s left-hand heavy and noticeably slower, even when she can see from the furrow in his brow and the rapid back and forth of his eyes over the page that the words are trying to fight their way out of his head. He’s only good for shorter stints, and he’s crotchety as hell in between them, because he’s in pain. Because there’s something wrong with his hand. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He denies it when anyone brings it up. He scoffs and does a dramatic rendition of the Itsy Bitsy Spider when Alexis raises the issue of the glasses he’s dropped, the coffee he’s sloshed, the yelp he lets out when she slaps his hand away from the potato chips he’s trying to poach from her. He dices garlic up, rapid fire and with considerable flair when Martha observes that he seems a little clumsy with the utensils, too, and he challenges Ryan and Esposito to endless rounds of paper football when they razz him about his penmanship on the board. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She—Kate—doesn’t bring it up, even though he can hardly hold his toothbrush, and he’s up two or three times a night, rummaging for ibuprofen, or just sitting in his office with his right hand cradled in his left. She hasn’t brought it up since the night of. It’s kind of a weird thing, because there’s obviously something wrong with it. He’s obviously in pain, but she can’t seem to call him on it, even though he’s being an idiot. She can’t seem to bring it up even though everyone else does. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It finally comes up when he burns her. She’s gotten home late. He’s insisted on making her tea, not just a cup—a proper pot, steeped to perfection. He’s doing penance for being crotchety earlier. He’s making up for snapping at her in the middle of the bullpen, then vacating the premises, trailing a mumbled apology behind him. He’s being fussy and courtly and making up an actual tray in case madame would like to take her tea in bed. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She is softening in the face of the attention. She’s smiling at his goofy routine, but she just wants a cup—a damned chunky, practical mug she can take four sips from while she slides down the headboard with weariness and ultimately passes out.. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I mean it, Castle.” She makes a grab for the fancy, thin-walled tea cup he’s rustled up from God knows where. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The move startles him as he turns to pour water just off the boil. The kettle rocks in his bad hand and the water splashes over hers, all the way across her knuckles. There’s an airless moment that’s beyond silence. She stares down in shock. His mouth gapes soundlessly open as he swings around, thrusting the kettle from him. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The clang of it on the burner, the hiss of water splashing on hot metal breaks the spell. She cries out. She makes a reflexive fist, which is absolutely the wrong thing to do. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Kate,” he makes a lunge for her and tugs her to the sink. “Kate, my God, I am so sorry.” He yanks the tap on most of the way to cold and reaches for wounded hand. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Why are you being an idiot?” She snatches it away from him. She holds her loose-curled fingers against her chest, away from the cool running water, even though it hurts. It fucking hurts. “Why?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Kate, I—” His mouth opens and closes. There’s no Itsy Bitsy Spider. There’s no performance. There’s nothing, and this is such a stupid fight. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“You hurt it.” She relents. She inches her hand toward him, hissing and scowling at even the gentle stream of water as it makes contact with the scalded skin. “Yours, not mine.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Yours, too,” he says mournfully. He whispers <em>sorry, sorry</em> as he shifts her hand slightly to make sure the water is trickling over the entire angry red expansion of skin. “I hurt your hand.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“You did,” she tells him through clenched teeth. “So you owe me. What happened?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He hangs his head and studies the backs of his fingers as he flexes them as best he can. “I punched him.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Golovkin?” Her spine straightens, it shifts the burn over the loose hold he has on her hand. It’s not the wisest move she’s ever made. “Castle tell me you did not punch a—” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Jenkins,” he cuts in. “Whatever his name is. I punched him for making me miss our wedding.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She laughs. It jostles her hand again and it turns into a pained yodel. He whispers a million more <em>sorrie</em>s, but he keeps her hand in the stream of water. And she keeps laughing as she pictures the scene—a dead Russian assassin, Jenkins with this silenced pistol, Castle with the sucker punch right jab and a witty <em>bon mot</em>, no doubt. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“You left that out,” she says when the laughter finally dies away. “I got all the other details.” She frowns, wondering suddenly. “I <em>better </em>have gotten all the other details.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“You did.” He slides his fingers into her hair and carefully pulls her to him for a kiss. “All the details.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“So?” She reaches for <em>his </em>wounded hand. She runs her thumb as gentle as she can over the last knuckle. He’s stoic, but  she can tell it’s tender, a little swollen and maybe even off line with the rest of his hand. “Why hold it back?”</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Dumb ending,” he says to the kitchen floor. “It’s a dumb ending.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She knows what he means. She knows how inadequate the sketchy details are, and however many lives he might have saved, she knows he still hasn’t made his peace with he question of how he could have agreed to go. She knows that a closed-fist jab and a probable boxer’s fracture are a shitty denouement, but this is what they have. It’s what they have and she’s sure as hell take it over the alternatives. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“I don’t know.” She reaches past him for a tea towel. She runs it under the cool water and wrings it out, awkward and one-handed. He takes it from her and folds into a workable compress. She takes him by the hand—the good hand—and leads him toward the bedroom. “Did you knock out a tooth?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Beckett,” he looks at her, sidelong, “if I had knocked out a tooth, I would be wearing it around my neck on a manly leather thong.”  </p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: I always find this episode hard to enter into. The boxer’s fracture is dumb, but maybe less dumb than biscuits for Cujo, which seemed to be my other option.Hmm.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0021"><h2>21. Ambit—In Plane Sight (7 x 21)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>His speech to the Sherlock Holmes Society is a rousing success. It’s entirely new material, courtesy of the harrowing experience that is the sole occupant of his mind. He speaks, off the cuff and in broad strokes, about the eternal appeal of a locked-room mystery, the thrill of committing the however improbable to the page, then walking backward through the world of the story to figure out how it must have happened. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="">
  <p>His speech to the Sherlock Holmes Society is a rousing success. It’s entirely new material, courtesy of the harrowing experience that is the sole occupant of his mind. He speaks, off the cuff and in broad strokes, about the eternal appeal of a locked-room mystery, the thrill of committing the <em>however improbable </em>to the page, then walking backward through the world of the story to figure out how it must have happened. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He has the Society members eating from his hand for the entirety of the speech, and they’re clamoring for more over brandy and hors d’oeuvre for what seems like an eternity afterward. He parades Alexis around, introducing her as his recently discovered Watson, which is her cue to point out that <em>he’s</em> the writer and let whoever she’s just met chuckle at the obvious conclusion. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The fact that the speech went so well buoys him for a while. The love of an audience comes to him by both nature and nurture—having a room full of people hanging on his every word  will always be a thrill. But even with that, he’s flagging long before it’s a decent hour to leave. Alexis is flagging. It’s the jet lag, it’s adrenaline crash, it’s the hard truth that everything about the way Kyle Ford’s murder shook out is just . . . sad. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Can I use you as my beard?” He slips his arm around Alexis and speaks low in her ear as though it’s time for the next performance of their routine. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Beard?” She cranes her neck and gives him a perplexed look. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Jet lag beard,” he clarifies quickly as one of the higher ups in the Society approaches with a couple they—somehow—have not met yet. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>His daughter’s answer is a Chewbacca-worthy yawn on cue. It’s either an inspired performance that would make her grandmother proud or the genuine article. Either way, it gets the job done. He chats apologetically with the couple—with the Society muckety-muck who wants him to commit to being their speaker again next year—for the shortest decent interval, and they’re on their way. Alexis tries to stay awake in the car long enough to text her friends that she’s definitely not up for a late-night pub meet, but she’s scowling at the typos she can’t seem to correct until he takes pity on her and takes dictation. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Back in the hotel, she bumps him sleepily with her hip. “Re-attach tomorrow. First thing,” she says before she stumbles off to her room. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The snick of the double doors closing settles something inside him. It’s been a long day—a long more-than-a-day given the early flight, the time difference, and everything—and he realizes with a little bit of the weight on his chest gone that he wasn’t quite convinced until just now that they’d both survived it. He sinks into one of the oversized leather chairs in the well-appointed sitting room and pulls out his phone to call Beckett, as he’d promised he would. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He’d teased her about it when she had extracted the promise earlier—<em>You know I get myself back to all kinds of hotels in all kinds of cities just fine all the time, right? Like a real big boy. </em>And she had answered in kind—<em>Yeah, big boy. I’ve seen some of the incident reports, remember? Just . . . text me, okay? </em></p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He tries to press his thumbs into service with something silly—something a little salacious—but he can’t seem to strike the right tone. He’s tired and wired and feels oddly shaky, as though the tiny bottles of airline alcohol and the practically medicinal amount of brandy he’d had at the Society have suddenly and well after the fact ganged up on him. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But it’s not alcohol. It’s not jet lag or even adrenaline crash. It’s Kate. It’s the thought of ending the day with a blue text bubble instead of a kiss, instead of laughter and soft conversation in the dark. It’s homesickness, he realizes with a jolt of surprise. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He’s not sure he’s ever <em>been </em>homesick before. Travel has been a huge component of his adult life. He’s always missed Alexis when he had to be away, but this feels different. It <em>is </em>different—this intense desire to be <em>home. </em>He sets the phone aside and grabs his iPad. He has a clumsy struggle with the hotel’s WiFi, and then there she is, filling his screen. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Hey!” She waves. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>There’s an apology on his lips. There’s a stupid shyness for a moment, but her smile is wide and pleased. “Hey,” he says back, not even caring how breathy and smitten he sounds. He <em>is </em>smitten, after all. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“How’d it go?” The world bounces and jostles as she shifts in her seat. He sees the Lucee Charlemagne Staircase over her shoulder and feels a swell of warmth, another throb of longing, as he realizes she’s in his office. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Great. Good.” Descending redundancy seems to be all he has in his repertoire when it comes to the speech. She gives him an odd look, but he just doesn’t especially want to talk about it. He wants to talk to <em>her. </em>He wants to talk<em> with </em>her, and he wishes it weren’t across an ocean. “What are you up to?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Nothing,” she says quickly. She shifts again, but it’s a smooth left-to-right move this time, as though the iPad is skating across the surface of his desk, leaving him with a view of his fencing foils. “Just. You know. Nothing.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Nothing. In my office.” He leans close to the camera, giving her a fish-eye view of his face as it swings from side to side as though he can actually scan the room. “Interesting.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Not interesting. Just in your office.” She sticks out her tongue at him. She pulls a silly face. She’s playing. He’s playing. It’s normal and sweet, but there’s an ache beneath it, and he is <em>so </em>homesick.  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“No, really,” he says softly. His hand rises toward the screen as though he can stroke her cheek. “What are you up to Kate?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“It’s . . .” She chews her lip. She looks nervous. “It’s dumb.”</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“What?” he prompts. He catches sight of his face, open and unguarded, and he wonders if this is what he looks like as they’re laughing ini the dark each night. “I miss you. I want to know.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She looks down, away from the camera, then sharply back toward it as if she expects to catch him out—to catch him up to to something. Her lip suffers another moment’s abuse, then she makes up her mind. The world shifts again, abruptly. It goes right to left this time, and rises. He sees an awkward angle of her face—the underside of her jaw, her ear. He pictures her with the iPad in the crook of her arm. There’s sudden light that makes him blink hard. There’s a sudden shift and her face is gone—all of her his gone. He’s about to protest when he realizes that she’s turned on the office flat screen. She’s pulled up a storyboard that he doesn’t recognize, not at first. But there is the Celestialis. There is his improvised fingerprint powder and the passenger manifest with a handful of names highlighted.  There is the usual rogues gallery of all the people the murderer isn’t. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The world turns one last time and her face fills the screen. She looks a little sheepish, but <em>only </em>a little, and he knows without a doubt that this is what she looks like when they laugh in the dark each night. “Didn’t get to do a board at the precinct. And I missed you. So . . .” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“So,” he repeats, missing her—missing <em>home</em>—fiercely. “So.”  </p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: Got away from me. This was supposed to be the MacGyver fingerprint. And then it was goopy. Gross.  Hmm.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0022"><h2>22. Bombinate—Dead from New York (7 x 22)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>She is buzzing, and it’s not from the paper-cup champagne, though she’d like to write it off to that. But this buzz is an almost literal thing. It races beneath her skin, zipping from elbow to fingertip and tickling along her ribs. It makes her kneecaps feel like they’re on vibrate and her mind—her mind is something else. It’s chaos in there, but . . . fun chaos, like a late night, worn-out punk rock show she’s fifteen years too young to have snuck out to see. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="">
  <p>She is buzzing, and it’s not from the paper-cup champagne, though she’d like to write it off to that. But this buzz is an almost literal thing. It races beneath her skin, zipping from elbow to fingertip and tickling along her ribs. It makes her kneecaps feel like they’re on vibrate and her mind—her mind is something else. It’s chaos in there, but . . . fun chaos, like a late night, worn-out punk rock show she’s fifteen years too young to have snuck out to see. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It’s an utterly foreign kind of syncopation inside her. It’s the opposite of what she feels like after a ride. On her bike, when she’s pushed herself as far as it’s wise to go, then she goes a little further, and the buzz downshifts to an absolutely regular hum all through her body. When she pulls off the helmet and shakes her hair out, her mind is a clear, wide open space. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>This is the opposite. It’s syncopated. It’s heady and strange, and she wishes it were the champagne. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Someone’s got the bug.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He crowds up behind her in the break room. She has the stack of cups in her hand, ready for disposal beneath something aromatic enough to mask the scent of alcohol. She’s weighing her options for disposal of the bottle itself.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“What <em>bug?”</em> She asks. She plays up the huffiness to cover, because he’s caught her out. Her body buzzes, inside and out. Her mind is chaos and he <em>snuck up on her. </em>So she bumps him out of the way with her hip like he’s a nuisance—like his nearness doesn’t have her sparking like a Tesla Coil.  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She busies herself. She tries to bleed off this dangerous energy with clean up, with stage business. There’s a metric ton of recycling in the blue bin. She peers into the depths and thinks that if she digs out enough she can conceal the evidence of their collective crime without having to ditch it in an alley on their way home like some teenage hoodlum.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“The showbiz bug.” He catches her around the waist, heedless of their standing rule against any serious PDAs in the workplace. He snugs her body against his with intention and the buzz turns <em>way </em>up. He hooks his chin over her shoulder and holds his phone where they both can see, and it’s them. It’s her barreling her way past her half-assed doppelgänger on to a live television set, and it’s him, hot on her heels. “The camera <em>does </em>love you,” he purrs in her ear. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“How?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Her hand closes around his. It closes around the phone and she’s crackling now. She is all static shocks and it doesn’t make any sense. Her cuffs are dangling from her hand. Her collar is not complete. She should feel like an utter fool, but she watches the smile—the eventual smile that spreads across her face—and she remembers the lights hitting her, the sight of herself on the monitors. She remembers that sudden rush as though the collective energy of the studio audience and six million viewers at home came sizzling right through her all at once. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“How is this anywhere?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She twists half around to face him. There are people peering through the blinds at the two of them as they pass by. There are pairs and twos and threes of them bending their heads together then smiling wide at her, giving her thumbs up and golf claps. He laughs at them. He squares his shoulders and mouths <em>No autographs</em>as though she’s famous and he’s her personal muscle. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“How is this anywhere?” He shakes his head at her. He takes her hand and spins her body out and away, then tight back into his body. “It’s <em>every</em>where. You’e viral.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Viral.” It seems like her voice should sound a little flat on the word. The world up till now suggests she should sound a little sick at the prospect, but she doesn’t. She’s <em>buzzing. </em>“Me. I am.”  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“You. You are,” he teases as he dances them in a two step and plays the clip again. “Of course, I do deserve <em>some </em>credit.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Oh, <em>do </em>you?” She knocks the back of her head against his collarbone and grins hard at the absolutely flummoxed look on Tina You-Have-A-Bizarre-Gait Whasterface’s face. “And what credit is that?” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“There.” He jams his thumb on the screen to pause the video. It lands on the exact moment he grabs her hand and tugs her to face the cameras. It lands on the exact moment this endless buzz jolted right into her. “There I am discovering you.”</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Discovering me, you say?” She turns all the way around in his arms this time. The buzz leaps from her body to his to hers again, and they are breaking <em>so </em>many rules right here in the break room. <em>So </em>many.rules. “And I didn’t even have to go the casting room couch route.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“So you think you’re bigger than me now, kid?” He hikes her body up his in a dramatic, silent era move. “Let me tell you something about <em>my </em>casting room couch: You don’t know what you’re missing.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Well,” she responds in kind, winding her arms around his neck. “Now I gotta know.” She leans in, her lips hovering just shy of his, buzzing. Buzzing. “I just gotta.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p> </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p> </p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: The object is the champagne. Even though it’s not the champagne. Hmm.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0023"><h2>23. Visage—Hollander's Woods (7 x 23)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>This is the boy he was. He is spread out on a desk—his desk, and it does not belong to the boy—thirty years and a million miles away. His handwriting is careful, his drawing is unsteady to say the least. The face—the mask—is Charlie Brown round with lightning-bolt cracks in the porcelain. He and the boy confer. They wonder together how many women beat their fists against that smooth surface with its black cross and streaked teardrops. How many women before Rosalita Cambeau and after, in their ferocious attempts to cling to life, had left behind those lightning-bolt cracks. </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="">
  <p>This is the boy he was. He is spread out on a desk—<em>his </em>desk, and it does not belong to the boy—thirty years and a million miles away. His handwriting is careful, his drawing is unsteady to say the least. The face—the mask—is Charlie Brown round with lightning-bolt cracks in the porcelain. He and the boy confer. They wonder together how many women beat their fists against that smooth surface with its black cross and streaked teardrops. How many women before Rosalita Cambeau and after, in their ferocious attempts to cling to life, had left behind those lightning-bolt cracks. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>This is the boy, too. He is thirty years and a million miles away. It is dawn in New Hampshire, and his pajama pants are soaked  to the knee from running through the wet grass to the end of the long, long driveway for the newspaper. Under the narrow overhang of the side porch, in the thin grey light of February, he pores over every page. He is shaking with cold when his friend’s father stumbles over him. He went for the paper, he explains. The door locked behind him. He is sorry. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>This is the boy stealing away from New Hampshire with four days’ worth of newspapers he’s salvaged from the trash. He thinks of their pages, crowded with things that are not the woman in the woods. They are crowded with things that are not a body with blood all over its face. Blood all over <em>her </em>face. They are crowded with things that are not skin that was cold like ice.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>This is the boy standing as still as he can while his mother rages. She has missed the quarters from her purse that he took for the pay phone. He didn’t need them. You don’t need quarters to call the police, he has learned, but he spent them anyway—all but one—on a candy bar because he was afraid all the way until the bell over the bodega door rang out and the mean woman with curlers in her hair yelled, right away, <em>Hey you, you buy something, huh? </em></p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>This is the boy with his heart pounding on a Thursday when his friend races into math class, talking breathlessly about a body in the woods by his house. His friend’s whispers are loud enough to bounce off the fogged up classroom windows. He gets the words wrong—he calls them Canada dogs, but the boy knows better. The boy has found out. <em>Cadaver dogs,</em> he writes in his smallest writing on the bottom corner of a page in the middle of his notebook, then tears the words out, oh so carefully. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>This is the boy he was. Lined pages with the dismal story of Sam the coolest kid in the sixth grade, faded newspapers, thirty years on, a dull silver quarter folded in a candy bar wrapper, and two words torn from a notebook. This is the boy he was. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <hr/>
</div><div class="">
  <p>This is the man he cannot live with, the one who gave up on the woman in the woods—Rosalita Cambeau, who smiled shyly at the camera in her stone-colored raincoat, who wore a red-checked shirt on the last day of her life. This man has the blood of  Emma Malloy and Zoey Addison on his hands, the blood of every woman since then who disappeared with no one to miss her. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>This is the man who, in all these thirty years, was good for no more than here-and-there missing persons checks, for puffed-up FBI deep dives when he was famous enough—when he could be bothered to spare a thought for Rosalita Cambeau, with her half-open eyes and her ice cold skin. And he couldn’t be bothered often. He couldn’t be bothered until . . .  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>And this is the man he does not know at all. This man’s mind is an alien, hostile place, ten months and a million miles away. He has no heart beating in his chest, no blood flowing through his veins, whatever he says with those pleading, soulless eyes in the moments after he breaks her heart—<em>Just know that I love you. I’ve always loved you. Always</em>. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>This is the man whose very existence he has cried over. He has knelt before her, raining tears into her hands and begging forgiveness. He has sobbed alone until he thought the bones of his skull would come apart. He has raged over him and brought all his imaginative powers to bear in trying to explain him out of existence with byzantine stories, because he cannot live with him. He cannot <em>abide</em> the thought that there is a man inside him who would open his mouth and pour out the story of Hollander’s Woods to Henry fucking Jenkins, or whoever he is. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But this is the man who undeniably did just that. Because Henry Jenkins, with his ludicrous, forgettable face—with his hackneyed line delivery and the unrelenting urgency of a B-movie minion—knows far more than the bare bones of Hollander’s Woods. He has more than a simple password to a the boy’s secret clubhouse—he has places and dates and life-changing take-home messages. Henry fucking Jenkins knows the answer to the question his daughter—a grown woman standing before him with her barely mended heart in her hands—has to ask. <em>When did you know</em>? </p>
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  <p>This is the man—the stranger—who stares out of the mirror each morning, heartless, bloodless, soulless. He is the man who ends each day with a kiss and soft words in the ear of the miracle he calls his wife now, and what right does he have<em>, </em>when<em> this</em> morning—on <em>this </em>day—she had to steady her voice, she had to catch her breath, she had to do the very simple Henry Jenkins math and swallow past the gall of it to ask—<em>Why didn’t you ever tell me this before? </em></p>
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  <hr/>
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  <p>This is the man he doesn’t know yet. He is making a study of him—the man he means to be from this night forward. It is not easy. Nothing about this is easy. There’s nothing to see at first, nothing to know or to study. There is, as Dorothy Parker may or may not have said of Oakland, no <em>there</em> there.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He is, as he must, unmaking the man he has been. This is an ending, as well as a beginning, after all, so he sits with cuffs undone, shirt half buttoned, and another myth in the making on the flat screen behind him—<em>Still more gruesome discoveries and many more questions . . </em>. . That myth doesn’t concern him. He is not—he will no longer be—the man whose name rises and falls from time to time in a newscaster’s cadences, as fabricated as the man who was. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He stares into the middle distance and does his damndest to make the acquaintance of humility. He stares at the neatly aligned spines bearing the name he gave himself and the letters dissolve into nothingness. He is not, in this moment, Richard Castle, Richard Rodgers, Richard, Rick, or Ricky. He is not the boy and he is not Sam, the coolest kid in the sixth grade. He took a man’s life today and though he would do it again—one hundred times over—rather than break her heart, he is not Castle. But he is not some irredeemable villain, either. He is, in this moment, unmade. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He is wondering, clear eyed and with his whole heart and soul, who he can call himself, what he has earned, what—if anything—he deserves. He is making a study who he will be from this night forward, now that the tie that binds him to the secret story of his own beginnings has been so finally and absolutely snipped.  </p>
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  <p>It’s she who calls him forth, of course. She comes to him in silk and the colors of the world after spring rain, clean scrubbed and infinitely gentle. She touches a finger to the bright red blood that still beads where the knife pressed into his throat, and he knows her care, her worry, her boundless love for him.  </p>
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  <p>He is a man with his heart pounding as she takes his face in her hands and tells him who he has always been. She leads him forward from this moment and shows him who he has spent his whole life waiting to be. </p>
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  <p>She gives him the gift of himself, an origin story that Henry Jenkins doesn’t know, that is not determined in any way by a mask with its lighting bolt cracks, shattered into a hundred pieces. She gives him the gift of a man he does not know, cannot see at all, until the truth falls from her lips, emphatic, obvious, and absolute—<em>We’re not here because of him. We’re here because of who we are in the face of people like him. </em></p>
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  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A/N: The mask, I suppose. This has been a rough go, and a questionable resumption of this project. I think, unfortunately, my broken relationship with the show is evident in everything for the last few months, and of course, the world is hard and terrible. I am, nonetheless, very grateful for those who read and for those who showed unwavering kindness to me about this project all along  and about making it through the end. That’s 302 stories, I guess.  Hmm. </p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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